I do think that it's utterly unacceptable for a backbone provider to force their customers to use their cache. I do, however, wish that more backbone providers would provide caching services to those people what want the service.

Most backbone providers run Squid in their datacenters and/or POPs and offer to do ICP with any customer who wants it. I don't like ICP -- see http://www.vix.com/ietf/htcp.txt for the protocol I proposed to replace it. But the model is sound, and I would like to see more backbone providers doing this.

So, If someone is using site exec, etc in their code, and their provider/webmaster/mother didn't set up Progma: nocache, they're effectively screwed...erm...cached, right?

No.

Fantastic. So, lets say I'm Joe Banner Advertizer. Company X has paid me present their banner. They wanted to limit the amount of money they spent so, they had me code my servers to only display their banner X times per day since I bill them on impressions. Backbone provider Z installs one of your boxes. By default, no matter how many connections on the limited.. ..erm.. client side of the box are initiated to retrieve a "fresh" banner from our banner-farm, you send them Company X until the cache times out.

No. For now, use freshness lifetimes (including pre-expiry for banners) and correctly behaving caches will at worst do a GET/If-Modified-Since whenever they are considering reusing the element -- so your origin server can count the hits and can control when the object can no longer be reused. The HTTP standard already supports this. It costs a TCP transaction per reuse, but it avoids the actual transmission of the banner ad whenever reuse is correct. In the near future, we'll see a different reuse model, based on RFC 2227: rfc2227.txt -- Simple Hit-Metering and Usage-Limiting for HTTP. J. Mogul, P. Leach. October 1997. (Format: TXT=85127 bytes) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) And again, the advertisers will be in full control, the standards will get followed, and the backbone will have more bits free for Internet Telephony. -- 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)