It’s true that when you boil it down the whole issue revolves around nothing more than a line The tools behind the ACAP-Robots.txt debate of instructions hidden away in a web page, but the implications go right to the heart of the publishing business and its fight for the future.
The publishers and organisations working to forge the ACAP standard will tell you that this is about nothing less than the right to preserve your own publishing lifeblood. Yet a voluble portion of the online community insists that it is just another example of knee-jerk conservatism from publishers failing to grasp the world of wikis and blogosphere.