These groups believe ACAP would allow search engines to better recognise usage terms and conditions of publishers and content providers.

Rob Jonas, head of media and publishing partnerships for Google in Europe, told the Guardian Media Summit Wednesday he believes the existing robots.txt terms and conditions protocol Google uses is sufficient, Journalism.co.uk reported. He said that although Google was involved with ACAP project working groups, the search giant is not looking to implement it.

Previously, WAN has urged Google and other search engines to participate in the ACAP project.

According to the ACAP Web site, “In the first instance, ACAP provides a framework that will allow any publisher, large or small, to express access and use policies in a language that search engines' robot "spiders" can be taught to understand. ACAP’s scope is now being extended to other business relationships and other media types including music and the audiovisual sectors. Technical work is ongoing to improve and finesse ACAP V.1.

“Thanks to the enabling, open nature of ACAP, content providers will now be able to make more content available to users through the search engines, and to continue to innovate and invest in the development of business models for network publishing. With ACAP, the online publishing environment will become as rich and diverse as the offline one.”

Jonas said in his keynote address at the conference that “the robots.txt protocol provides everything that most publishers need to do. Until we see strong reasons for improving on that, we think it will get every one where they need to be,” according to Journalism.co.uk.

WAN has previously called Google's and other search engines' refusals “troubling.”