Google CEO Eric Schmidt has denied that Google’s resistance to using ACAP is based on ‘wanting to control’ publishers information, insisting that it is strictly a technology issues.
Speaking to iTWire, Schmidt said: “ACAP is a standard proposed by a set of people who are trying to solve the problem [of communicating content access permissions]. We have some people working with them to see if the proposal can be modified to work in the way our search engines work. At present it does not fit with the way our systems operate.”
According to iTWire, Schmidt went on to deny that Google’s reluctance so far to use the rights and permissions technology was because Google wanted as few barriers as possible between online content and its search engines. “It is not that we don’t want them to be able to control their information.”
Schmidt made his comments after a tit-for-tat exchange last week in which Gavin O’Reilly, chairman of World Association of Newspaper and ACAP CEO, reacted strongly to claims made by a senior Google executive that the search engine believed ACAP was an unnecessary system and that its function could be fulfilled by existing web standards.
I spoke with the director of Web search R&D at the French search company Exalead, which worked with ACAP to develop the protocol. He told me that what Schmidt said about technology obstacles “made no sense.” Exalead has been working with the search engine companies for over a year on acap, which is just an extension of robots.txt. Does anyone really believe that a company with Google’s technical ability would not have figured it out by now? Google might be being a little bad. contact me if you’re interested in reading my story in the most recent seybold report.