ACAP content protection protocol "doesn't work" says Google CEO

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 12:14

Your IT - Home IT

"Google should reflect on the fact that after 12 months of intensive cross industry consideration and active development – which Google has been party to – publishers have identified not only the patent inadequacies of robots.txt, but more progressively have come up with a practical, open and workable solution for publishers and content aggregators. So, we – once again - call upon Google to embrace ACAP and to readily acknowledge the right of content owners to determine how their content is used."

According to ACAP "robots.txt is a well established method for communication between content owners and crawler operators. However, robots.txt is not sophisticated enough for today's content and publishing models. Robots.txt, in its current form as implemented by most search engine operators, provides only a simple choice between allowing and disallowing access. These simple choices are inconsistently interpreted. A number of proprietary extensions have been implemented by several of the major search engines, but not all search engines recognise all or even any of these extensions." ACAP, in contrast, "provides a standard mechanism for expressing conditional access which is what is now required."

ACAP claims that the various court cases that have arisen between publishers and Google are a symptom of the problem that ACAP seeks to solve, not the problem itself.

Google aims to get around the problem of access to proprietary content by striking commercial deals with some publishers, but ACAP says this will not solve the problem. "Business relationships on the Internet should not simply be about deals done between very large corporations. It will not be possible to manage the very large number of business relationships in the absence of much greater automation. ACAP aims to enable the majority of smaller publishers, smaller search engines and other innovative intermediaries to enter the growing market for online content with confidence."