Adding to yesterday's essay... consider the lawsuits against Napster. (Metallica and a probable one by Dr. Dre) The thing is, all Napster does is blindly index what's being made available on the service, by file name. If we hold them responsible for the use their service is put to, we'll open the door in this country to what I talked about in the essay.

"I raised this objection to make a point," Moore says. "Interception proxies increase the complexity of the Internet and cause more problems than they solve. This is not something that we want to encourage.

That provides one small real-world explanation of the pragmatic anti-proxy argument, as expressed in the article:

We've since corrected those issues, but it was months before someone told us about them. Our browser logs indicate that the person who told us about the problem was far from the only visitor from AOL... what did the rest of them think, as they left our site, most likely never to return?

The damage done by these things is quite real; even at the website I work at, which is mostly internal to Michigan State University, we've had some trouble with people using AOL to access the Job Postings page (our most popular public page by nearly an order of magnitude ). AOL's interception proxy was rendering our pages unreadable, even though the AOL browser was perfectly capable of rendering the page, because AOL processed the graphics and destroyed them in the process.

So, what do I say? I agree with the position the "IP purists" are taking in the article. When an ISP hides an interception proxy between you and the server you are trying to connect to, it degrades the integrity of the server's message. You should always at least have the option of bypassing the proxy, and I'd prefer that it be merely made an option to fall back on in the case of congestion.

I guess I'm both an IP purist and a pragmatist. Any concept IP is useless if it can't be applied and is not beneficial to the society.

The debate pits IP purists, who argue that the IETF should not encourage the use of interception proxies, against pragmatists, who argue that standardization of this common practice is useful.

Is Web caching bad for the Internet?: This is an interesting and complicated issue. You pretty much have to read the article to understand what the debate is about, it's really hard to summarize anything.

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