Google News may shut over EU plans to charge tax for links

Search engine is lobbying hard to stop proposed tax, aimed at compensating news publishers

Google's top news executive has refused to rule out shutting down Google News in EU countries, as the search engine faces a battle with Brussels over plans to charge a "link tax" for using news stories.

Richard Gingras, the search engine's vice-president of news, said while "it's not desirable to shut down services" the company was deeply concerned about the current proposals, which are designed to compensate struggling news publishers if snippets of their articles appear in search results.