Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google, helpfully reminds news publishers that they can stop Google from indexing their webpages by usint the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). Publishers can also set a time period for indexing, for example if content goes into a paid archive after a certain time.

Cohen’s comments follow a declaration from the European Publishers Council last week demanding new intellectual property rights protection.

“Some proposals we’ve seen from news publishers are well-intentioned, but would fundamentally change – for the worse – the way the web works,” he writes.

“Our guiding principle is that whatever technical standards we introduce must work for the whole web (big publishers and small), not just for one subset or field.

“There’s a simple reason behind this. The internet has opened up enormous possibilities for education, learning, and commerce so it’s important that search engines makes it easy for those who want to share their content to do so – while also providing robust controls for those who want to limit access.”

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