WAN, ACAP ... WTF?

The World Association of Newspapers is launching a technical project to enable mutually beneficial business relationships between newspaper publishers and search engines operators. Like any technical project, the baby needs a name, so they called it ACAP, or Automated Content Access Protocol. The project is to be introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 6. October and I hope I'll get a better understanding of what they are aiming at when I visit their booth. From what I gather reading some initial news reports and opinion, the project is based on a lot of FUD and the desire to control just about anything that is published on the Internet.

I think of ACAP as some sort of robots.txt on steroids. It's not black and white, it's not ALLOW or DISALLOW. ACAP is supposed to tell a search engine something like this: ALLOW, but only for two weeks, then delete from cache and redirect to payment gateway instead. While this might be appealing to content publishers at first sight, I think it's just adding complexity to a very simple question: Should content be free? And instead of trying to answer that question with YES or NO, WAN is aiming for an ambiguous compromise.