Google must adopt ACAP, says Guardian chairman

Google must sign up to ACAP and stop devaluing content providers, the chairman of the Guardian Media Group has said.

Giving evidence to a House of Lords Communications Committee looking into media ownership, Paul Myners said search engines - such as Google - that are not currently signed up to the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) have unbalanced the relationship with content providers.

Google has refused to implement the ACAP system - which gives content providers more control over how their content is indexed and used by search engines - despite participating in working groups on the project during its pilot phase.

The search giant has maintained that use of Robots.txt files is sufficient to provide rights and access information for the spidering technology it uses to gather information, as it's widely used across the industry and is currently the standard protocol.

"We feel that the current situation does not fairly represent the value that the content providers bring to the search engines and the aggregators," Myners told the committee.

"It's a symbiotic relationship - they need us and we need them, but sometimes it feels that the balance of need is not one which is equitably rewarded."

His comments came in spite of previous claims by The Guardian that it is not using the technology, but is 'following its progress'.

ACAP will only work if the agreed parties recognise the mutual benefits of the protocol, Myners added.

"The sort of agreement that we seek through ACAP is one which will only work if all parties to the agreement recognise that it is in their interest for it to work... that there is a symbiotic relationship that is in both parties' interests to sustain and neither parties' interests to abuse at the unreasonable expense of the other."

The GMG Chairman also urged the UK Intellectual Property Office to look at the copyright and competition issues 'evolving as a result of the growth of search and aggregation' online.

However, he said he had no reason to believe that search engines and news aggregation services try to influence readers' opinions of news events by the way they display content from providers.

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