Is Web caching bad for the Internet? Content Integrity6/5/2000; 7:16:28 AM April 19, 2000: 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.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.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.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. Barring technical considerations, though, they should not be used, and it's downright unethical to not inform the user of their existance. (Apparently some ISPs actually function that way!)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. In addition, the AOL proxy was serving old copies of the job postings page, causing people to apply for jobs that had already been filled; and worse, not applying for the current jobs.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?That provides one small real-world explanation of the pragmatic anti-proxy argument, as expressed in the article:

"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."