Yesterday the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) issued a statement that “welcomed Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s statement supporting the aim of the Automated Content Access Protocol.” (ACAP is a WAN-backed online publishing standard that allows terms and conditions for Web content to be placed in machine-readable format so publishers can have a say in how news aggregators and search engine companies use their content.)
If this confuses you, then you are probably not alone.
On Mar. 14, Tidbits reported that less than a week ago WAN released a terse statement calling on Google “to respect the rights of content creators and embrace ACAP.” It criticized Google for acting in “its own commercial self-interest” by its apparent reluctance to accept the new search engine protocol known as ACAP. Gavin O’Reilly, President of WAN and Chairman of ACAP, did not mince his words, warning the search engine behemoth not to “glibly throw mistruths about.”
The earlier statement was in reaction to comments made by Google European executive Rob Jonas in his Mar. 12 keynote address to the Guardian Media Summit. Journalism.co.uk reported that Jonas said the existing robots.txt protocol “provides everything most publishers need.” According to WAN, this remark implied that Google is not keen on embracing ACAP.
Since then, Google has clarified its position. According to the Australian tech news site ITwire, Schmidt now says that the only thing holding Google back from implementing ACAP is technical incompatibilities. “We have some people working with [ACAP] to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. It is not that we don’t want [publishers] to be able to control their information.”
WAN’s O’Reilly responded: “We are pleased that Google …would be willing to implement ACAP if it were not for some technical incompatibility issues. …We have worked very closely with Google at a technical level throughout the past year in the ACAP project phase. Naturally, we are disappointed that we have yet to overcome their remaining technical barriers to ‘live’ implementation, but we have always stressed that we will do whatever is necessary to make ACAP work technically and seamlessly for all search engines. Our aspirations for ACAP have always been led by business needs and not by any preconceived technical solution.”
…Where does this leave us? Either Jonas’ comments on ACAP were misconstrued, or WAN’s initial response was an overreaction. Or perhaps this is a case of Google’s senior execs not singing from the same hymn sheet?
