[OT]: Who owns the robots.txt "protocol?"

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 09:49:52PM -0400, Scott Elcomb wrote:
> Did I miss something, or is it just in the wording?
> 
> From the Official Google Blog:
> 
> "This is the third and last in my series of blog posts about the
> Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). In the first post, I introduced
> robots.txt and the robots META tags, giving an overview of when to use
> them. In the second post, I shared some examples of what you can do
> with the REP. Today, I'll introduce two new features that we have
> recently added to the protocol."
> 
> http://tinyurl.com/35dksy
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html
> 
> In particular, it's the last line that bugs me.  I've been a long time
> fan of Google, and use many of their services, but lately they've been
> reaching in ways (as others have noted) that make me think twice.
> 
> In that regards, did Google somehow acquire "management rights" over
> the REP, or is this just "microsoftism?"

Well I think robots.txt was designed to support new tags, which other
robots are allowed to ignore if they don't understand, so probably
nothing wrong with google saying 'our bot now supports these additional
tags'.

--
Len Sorensen
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