Keep a very close eye on ACAP…
A broad collection of content publishers have banded together to form a standards group call ACAP - Automated Content Access Protocol. They released the first version of their proposed standard yesterday. The goal of this standard is to give publishers a means of controlling how their content is discovered, indexed, and retained by web search engines. The objective of this group has been to replace ROBOTS.TXT, the current standard used to direct and limit web crawling, with a more robust and comprehensive model that provides more granular content permissioning.
And that’s not all…
ACAP outlines a more comprehensive long term agenda of control that places them in the middle of just about every type of content exchange that happens on the web today. They claim that having a standard like this in place, one which offers more flexible and descriptive rules for how their content can be used, will end up letting them make more content available to users. Their argument is that more content will be available to more people if everyone just goes along with more control.
Unfortunately, that sounds like the same argument used by the big media companies to justify adding Digital Rights Management to just about everything they’ve produced.
And look at where that got them…
The media marketplace today is weak, fragmented, and struggling to remain relevant. The promised flood of ‘back catalog’ content never materialized, and prices never came close to the market’s perception of the value they received from digital distribution. Unfortunately, DRM was always more about protecting outdated business models than providing any benefits for consumers. And everyone has suffered because of it - both producers and consumers. The industry might never recover.
The same will be true with the publishing industry and ACAP…
All their marketing spin aside, ACAP is just a money grab by the publishers. Not satisfied with monetizing the significant traffic search engines generate to their own web properties, they now want to sell the right for search engines to index pieces of their content in the first place.
And that mindset has some serious implications for the future of the web…
The free web would start to erode. If they are unable to ‘pay to play’, small and niche search providers will fade away, along with any disruptive innovation they might have brought. The remaining folks - the Google’s, Microsoft’s, Yahoo’s, and Ask’s - will not doubt end up paying, and will likely try to create exclusives of some kind with these publishers to differentiate themselves and maximize their returns. If that were to happen, we could end up with a patchwork of coverage that will balkanize the search space.
And it could even jeopardize open content technologies like RSS…
The entire premise of ACAP is dangerous. It threatens free and open search on the web, and can easily become a slippery slope. The right to link to other sites freely, to create unencumbered feed readers that aggregate content, to aggregate comments left at sites, or to deliver other content centered innovations could all be at risk.
The publishing industry, like their peers in the media industry, remained rooted in the past and failed to adapt their companies and business models to the realities of a digital world. Instead of innovating, they want to go back to the way business was 20 years ago. Back to when they had total control and consumers had little choice.
ACAP is their attempt to reclaim that on the internet.
The entire web community will suffer if they succeed…
You can check the ACAP site at: http://www.the-acap.org/
A good overview document can be found here: ACAP Business Case.
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