Google’s simple response to the European Publisher Councel (EPC)

Posted on 15. Jul, 2009 by Andrew in Newspapers

It didn’t take long for Google to respond to the demands of the European Publisher Councel. The EPC had said that the entire future of journalism was at stake unless a better way to protect IP could be found.

They did not like Google getting access to their content for free.

Google’s response is a 101 of search engine optimisation. There is a protocol older than Google for controlling whether spiders (as Google uses to index online papers) can access your content or not. The Robots Exclusion Protocol allows publishers to tell Google (and every other well behaved news aggregator) to go away with just two lines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The formatting in Google’s post isn’t very clear. That star should be after the user-agent and not before the disallow.

Will papers use this? Doubtful. Why would they turn away all that free traffic? Google points out that they also offer publishers a way to retract their content after a certain date. This is a technique that combines very nicely with a pay wall and Google’s first click free offering.

Google does not like some of the publishers’ ideas and describes some of the proposals as fundamental change for the worse.

We expect the EPC to reply. Do you?