Any content provider savvy enough to put that up could just as easily put in the proper headers to tag their content as cacheable or uncacheable or cacheable until time X, and that would be better for *everyone* involved.

yes, but they don't, and they won't, not ever. expecting other people to do the right thing is just not a hallmark of good operational practice, nor is it a NANOG tradition.

...

dialup users, corporate customers and downstream ISPs who utilize those links. Cached content is delivered accurately

Accurately is a bone of contention. We've all seen what caching can do to time sensitive web-sites.

"go ahead, make my day." as the principal architect of a caching product which served up yesterday's newspaper when today's newspaper was wanted, for pretty much all of 1997, to about two dozen hardy "early adopters" (you can tell who they are by the flaming arrows sticking out of their backs), i'm now perfectly willing to challenge you to find any content, no matter how broken or mangled or missing its headers are, that a Web Gateway Interceptor can't serve correctly. and that's without any central registry of "bad content" such as that described by in the post here from inktomi earlier in the day. i'm not saying this out of a desire to use NANOG for product advertising; my last caching product pretty much served its purpose by showing that this kind of caching doesn't win back enough bandwidth if correctness is the goal, and the product has no distribution channel at all. i can't make money by arguing about transparent caching on NANOG -- trust me. so really i'm just flaming. correctness *can* be maintained. content creators will *not* do the right thing. anybody who says otherwise is welcome to tell me a URL they think my WGI can't serve and also show me mail from a content creator saying "thanks for telling me that i was doing the wrong thing, i'll fix my Expires: headers immediately!" -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul@vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)