ACAP Blog

This ACAP blog is being written at the end of three very busy weeks for the project. I have had a lot of enquiries from journalists, interested in the progress of ACAP following our dialogue in the press with Google, and one question they all seem to want an answer to is “Why are publishers being so slow to implement ACAP?”

This seems to me to be a rather startling question. We published the specification for ACAP only in November last year. Publishers implementing ACAP now are doing so to show that they want and intend to use ACAP in the long term to control the policies they set for the reuse of their content. Implementation now, while it has no practical effect, is just one way of showing support, alongside joining ACAP and pledging technical or financial resources to helping development. While implementation is not a large task technically, as the growing list of sites which have done it shows, it still has to take its place in the queue of tasks to be done. And for the time being, it has no effect until it is also implemented by search engines and other intermediaries. Until this changes, publishers will be expressing their policies in language that no one is actively interpreting.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that the question that journalists should be asking is “How have you persuaded so many publishers to implement ACAP so quickly?” The list is growing all the time – at least 16 countries represented at the last count, and publishers ranging from household names to individual bloggers. And these are just the ones who have told us that they have already implemented. There is an even longer list of publishers who have committed to implement.

How are we achieving this traction? Well, to me it’s pretty obvious. ACAP is an idea whose time has come. Everyone can understand that it isn’t possible to manage content supply on the network in the absence of machine-to-machine communication, and that communication requires a standard language for the expression of permissions and other policies. ACAP has been designed to fill that gap.

Although ACAP is sometimes characterised as being simply about the relationship between a small group of large publishers and a small group of large search engines, the reality is different. Our first set of Use Cases may have had a focus on search, and this is reflected in ACAP v1.0. But it is only 1.0; the beginning, not the end.

Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director