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LONDON — Google News is saying goodbye to Spain.

The website, which compiles headlines and summaries of news articles from various sources, will go dark in Spain on Dec. 16. Google plans to shut the site there in protest of a new law that would force the company and other news aggregators to pay Spanish publishers for the use of their content.

The rules, which come into force in January, do not specify how much Google and others like Yahoo News would have to pay per article. But they carry a potential one-time $750,000 fine if companies do not comply with the law.

The legislation follows similar rules in other countries, including France and Germany, that allow publishers to charge when parts of their articles are included in Google’s news aggregation. In those countries, the company has tended to come to terms with the publishers, rather than withdraw from the field. But the Spanish rule will not allow local publishers to forgo such payments.

And in the case of Spain, it is not clear what parties, if any, will benefit from the new rules.

While the law is aimed at providing much-needed revenue to Spanish publishers, which are struggling to generate income from their online offerings, the loss of Google News and the traffic that it sends to local newspapers may end up hurting publishers that often rely on the company’s service to direct people to their websites. In Germany, some publishers have opted to waive their right to demand fees, rather than lose the traffic Google sends their way.

But Google’s dominance of Europe’s online world — its search business holds a market share of about 85 percent, bigger than in the United States — has European officials trying to rein it in.

The European antitrust authorities in Brussels asked on Thursday for more information from online mapping and travel companies as part of the European Commission’s long-running investigation into Google’s business practices. And the search engine has been struggling to cope with a European privacy ruling this year that allows people to ask that some links about themselves be removed from global search results.

Google, which reported revenue of $16.5 billion in the third quarter, said on Thursday that the Spanish law, which has been nicknamed the Google Tax, would make it too costly for the company to continue operating its local news site, although Spanish publishers’ content would still be available in its regular search results.

‘‘It’s with real sadness that we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain,’’ Richard Gingras, the head of Google News, said in a blog post, adding that the search engine’s news product directed millions of readers to publishers’ websites. ‘‘As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site), this new approach is simply not sustainable.’’

In response, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, which helped draft the new rules, said in a statement that Google’s choosing to close its local news aggregator was a ‘‘business decision’’ separate from the country’s legal process, and that news and other information would still be freely available on the Internet.

As part of Google’s decision to shut Google News in Spain, which is the first time the company has taken down its aggregator service for legal reasons, it will also remove all Spanish publishers, including El País, from its global news aggregating products.

In total, Google News in Spain receives about 3.5 million visitors a month, making it the 226th most-visited site in the country, according to SimilarWeb, a digital measurement company. That compares with more than 250 million monthly visitors in the United States, where Google News is the 30th most-visited website.

Although the Spanish law is aimed solely at online news aggregators, changes in how people use technology may soon make the rules redundant.

That is because individuals, many of whom rely on smartphones to surf the web, are increasingly finding news content through online searches and social media posts, not aggregation sites.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo, for example, receives just 1.3 percent of its monthly traffic from Google News, compared with 34 percent from search engine queries, according to SimilarWeb. In contrast, the news agency Reuters still relies on news aggregators for about 44 percent of its Internet traffic in the United States.

For some publishers, however, Google News still plays an important role in how people consume digital content.

After Germany passed rules that permitted publishers to charge aggregating sites when their articles appeared online, Google removed many German organizations from its news product, which led to a drastic fall in online traffic to some newspapers’ sites.

Axel Springer, which has talked openly about Google’s dominance, experienced a 40 percent decline in traffic coming from Google’s search results and an 80 percent drop in traffic from Google News, according to Mathias Döpfner, Axel Springer’s chief executive.

Mr. Döpfner said that Axel Springer would have ‘‘shot ourselves out of the market’’ if the company had continued demanding that news aggregating sites pay a licensing fee for its content.

Google has faced similar challenges with French and Belgian publishers, but eventually reached an agreement with local newspapers, which includes the creation of $74 million fund to help French publishers with their digital operations.