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On Thu, 4 May 1995, Josh Hartmann wrote:

> This is an interesting thread.
> 
> Here's a potential outcome of all of this....
> 
> The Big Three build well-behaved caching proxy servers which pay attention
> to expiration information. But they fail to report back to the original
> publisher the number of hits on the cache for all of the reasons outlined
> in other messages.

Caching actually does me a favor, it frees my server up to serve outside 
customers.  The problem comes when the caching is used to keep 
info-merchants from discovering that they are getting 40,000 deep 
hits/day from 10,000 AOL customers.  This would be useful information if 
I want to negotiate for a royalty check, or if I wanted to compete with 
AOL pages for advertizing.

> OK, let's say then that publishers decide, "Hey, we really need to know how
> many times we're getting hit. What if we fool the system by setting the
> expiration dates to zero for all of our documents. That way, the
> well-behaved caches should come back every time for a new document."

It might be more sensible to put up a "micropage" that sends almost 
nothing back.  Let them cache the text, but a tag would be "hit" with 
each request.

> The Big Three will then perhaps say, "Ouch, performance is really going
> down for our customers. It costs a lot in technical and financial resources
> to upgrade our system, so let's start ignoring expiration information."

The issue is not who actually stores the bits on the drive but that 
proper attribution and reporting is maintained.  If AOL wants to hit a 
microtag, or just send get permission for each hit, and identify each 
user (standard http authentication info), the actualy bytes don't even 
need to move.

I know of about 50 companies that make news feeds available on corporate 
LANs through corporate servers.  So long as the attribution and billion 
is right, the feed vendors would be happy to let them cache gigabytes.
In some cases, the feed vendors even send CD-ROMs.

> Of course, they could always decide not to offer web services in the first
> place. :)
The internet has been available for 10 years, commercially for 5.  The 
big services are being pulled into the internet kicking and screaming.  
Once they get their feet wet, they seem to get very happy.

	Rex Ballard.

From rballard@cnj.digex.net Tue May  9 23:07:55 1995