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Interesting discussion. Couple of thoughts:
The use of words such as right and wrong or good an bad applied to the
engineering seem a bit premature, as the "engineering" work doesn't yet
exist. It would be more intellectually honest to say that the end goal of
the proposed work does not match your value system, which itself may not
match the value system of others on this list.
It appears that there are four interests at work here: that of the
network owner, the content provider, the content user, and the
middleman. The role of the middleman may or may not be useful from the
perspective of the other three. Whether and how the middleman is used
may/should involve the explicit knowledge and consent of the other three
interested parties. The network provider may not want his network abused
by the traffic it carries, the content provider may want control over how
it is displayed, the user may want control over what is presented or
not. I would require that the roles and relationships be detectable and
allow all possible relationship combinations. In the end the market will
determine what works and what doesn't (good/bad).
I have not seen where layering has been violated, as these all seem to be
occurring in the application layer above the core network layers and thus
end-to-end. If I have misunderstood this, then please explain to me how
email is end-to-end.
Perhaps a set of objectives would help clarify/constrain the solution to
an acceptable end-result. It might also be useful to describe some of the
potential middlemen and their functions that would be "good" to have, as
well as some potentail "bad" ones and how they can be mitigated.
Mike