I think this is more of an issue for Extensible Proxies than the others.
I'm in complete agreement on the fault isolation issue. For other things,
while roles and responsibilities are ultimately important, binding
agreements on paper are perfectly acceptable (i.e., they do not
have to have an on-the-wire format). That being said, I'd like to
see the IETF standardize on protocol representations of references
to SLA's, contracts, etc., so that accounting systems could refer
to the billing basis, the authorization agreeement, etc. It's not
a perfect solution, but it's a start.
Hilarie
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> 11/09/00 02:04PM >>>
one thing that I think is essential in any new content-distribution
work is to explicitly define roles and responsibilities - when an
intermediary is introduced between the content-provider and the
content-user, to which party is the intermediary responsible?
(the same device might be used in either case, but intermediaries
should be clear about whose instructions they are following)
under no circumstances should content be altered, nor should stale
content be delivered, except with explicit consent from at least one
of the end parties. for example, we don't want to standardize a
way to allow an ISP to alter or cache content except as intended
by one of the end parties.
finally, there need to be provisions for fault isolation and
diagnosis, which probably requires (among other things) the
ability to bypass intermediaries.
Keith