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Gordon's Republic

Google has a change of heart... kind of

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Google seems to have had a change of heart on the issue of giving publishers more control of their content, claiming that the only barriers to change was a technical one. This from Google, which is not know for being famously short of developers.
Earlier this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he supported the aim of the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) to give publishers more control over the use of their content.

At a conference in Sydney, Schmidt said that the only barriers to Google's implementation of ACAP were "technical", and he denied that Google was reluctant to embrace the system because of commercial self-interest.
"It is not that we don't want them [publishers] to be able to control their information," he said.

Schmidt added said that ACAP, as currently specified, is incompatible with Google's proprietary search engine technology but that "we have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work". There is no timetable yet, but it should not take a great deal of time to fix.

When it comes to Google these days, if you're a content publisher you have to take most of what it says with a pinch of salt. Which is sad, because Google we used to love you. A lot.

Some people have dismissed the ACAP publishing standard (it basically allows website terms and conditions to be placed in machine-readable format so that publishers can have a say in how news aggregators and search engine companies use their content) as not being meaningful, or as our publisher put it, "shutting the gate after the horse has bolted".

And he has a point to a degree, but there is more than a principle at play here. How and what happens to content on the web today will affect how the business develops in the future. Google is a big part of that business and publishers need to do whatever they can to protect their content and ensure wherever possible that it is properly used.

The announcement by Schmidt has been welcomed by the World Association of Newspapers and the International Publishers Association.

Gavin O'Reilly, president of WAN and chairman of ACAP, said: "We are pleased that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that they would be willing to implement ACAP if it were not for some technical incompatibility issues. As Mr. Schmidt knows, 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 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."

Published Mar 19 2008, 04:24 PM by Gordon Macmillan

Filed under: ACAP, Google

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