The primary drivers behind ACAP are WAN, which Shaping the Future of the Newspaper is part of, the European Publishers Council (EPC) and the International Publishers Association (IPA).

Jonas was quoted as saying Wednesday at the Guardian Media Summit that the current “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.”

WAN announced Friday that it disagrees with Jonas's statements, stating that although the current robots.txt standard allows publishers to accept or reject search engine crawlers, used to find content and use it on third-party Web sites, such as Google News, it allows publishers only two options: “yes” or “no,” and is out of date compared to the fast-paced changing digital media landscape around it. The new ACAP standard, by comparison, allows publishers more options than just “yes” or “no,” WAN said in a statement.

“It's rather strange for Google to be telling publishers what they should think about robots.txt, when publishers worldwide - across all sectors - have already and clearly told Google that they fundamentally disagree," said Gavin O'Reilly, president of WAN and head of the ACAP consortium. "If Google's reason for not (apparently) supporting ACAP is built on its own commercial self-interest, then it should say so, and not glibly throw mistruths about.

“Publishers have specifically requested that Google respect the rights of content creators – which is a fairly uncontroversial request," he said. “Google should reflect on the fact that after 12 months of intensive cross industry consideration and active development – in which Google has been party to – publishers have identified not only the patent inadequacies of robots.txt, but more progressively have come up with a practical, open and workable solution for publishers and content aggregators.”