ACAP Blog

The ability to express much more sophisticated sets of permissions for access and use of content in the network environment in machine readable form is an essential step towards building robust and mutually beneficial business models for content distribution in the 21st Century. Business relationships between content owners and intermediaries have until now been limited to unrefined “bulk” deals. It is always risky to predict future business models, which are created by the complex ecosystem of the market; ACAP is not intended to formulate future business models, but to enable a broader range of more sophisticated and refined potential business models than is currently possible.

We believe that, to this end, the development of open, flexible and extensible enabling standards is a critical component:

• Machine‐to‐machine communication is essential – the scale of the content value chain on the network is such that human intervention in every content transaction is inconceivable
• Communication standards are essential to the effective conduct of many‐to‐many business relationships – the alternative of multiple bilateral communication protocols is unscalable from both cost and manageability perspectives
• Flexibility and extensibility are necessary, because our ability to forecast future requirements in a period of rapid and unpredictable change is low
• Openness is critical to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible; proprietary solutions can only result in a reduction in competition, to everyone’s detriment

What types of new business might result from the development of ACAP, for search engines and publishers working in partnership?

1. Beginning with content that is freely available on the web, ACAP will allow publishers to be more confident about the use to which their content is put, allowing discrimination (for example) between trusted and untrusted partners and between different usages. ACAP will allow (again as an example) time‐based factors to be taken into account in spidering rules, giving publishers much finer control over dissemination of content at different stages in its life‐cycle
2. With content that is currently not publicly available, ACAP will create the technological framework for web site owners to allow access to content behind firewalls (book content,for example) with much finer control of the conditions under which it can be spidered – giving confidence to publishers that they can retain a direct influence over what is displayed to users and other access conditions – thus increasing the publishers’ confidence that in making their content available for search they are not damaging their core business models