When internet users in Spain visit news.google.es this morning, they will see not the Spanish version of Google’s news-aggregation service, but a note telling them that service no longer exists. The online giant shut it down today: a defiant response to a local law that will force news aggregators to pay Spanish publishers a fee for linking to their articles (and is stricter than a similar German law, which makes such payments optional). Yet it is also another twist in a battle taking place across Europe over who sets the rules online—not just in matters of copyright, but antitrust policy and privacy, too. Spain’s publishers now say that they want the government to stop Google from shutting down the service, because they see it as an essential utility. Quite how that can be done is not clear.