[Mark Nottingham: Mon, Sep 18, 2000 at 08:14:08PM -0700]
It's interesting that Web caching seems to be losing ground to CDNs
so rapidly; to me, this illustrates the point perfectly. Web caching
was always performed in the interest of the access provider, not the
content provider (or arguably even the user). As a result, content
providers don't trust Web caches.
I think your conclusion doesn't go far enough. I completely agree that
caching is moving from a information consumer to information provider
driven model, but I think this is because of both a lack of trust on
the part of the information provider (as you assert) and a desire to
see more thorough deployments. Information consumers, in many
situations, didn't have sufficient motivation to deploy the
infrastructure that the providers do and this limited the breadth of
installations.
CDN as an extension of hosting has really come, and I suspect will be
with us for a while.. it makes interesting economic models available
as choices.. (can I go with a bargain basement origin hosting
facility if I have a decent CDN? Probably depends on your content..)
-P