Re: Hit-metering: to Proposed Standard?

On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, Ari Luotonen wrote:
> 
> The need obviously originates from origin server operators, as they
> need their true statistics for billing based on ad exposure etc.  I
> think most people would agree that they are entitled to that
> information.

No - I think that after some thought, most people would conclude that they
*want* that information, but are not necessarily *entitled* to that
information. The key here is that they are paying their *service provider*
not *us*. The *obligations* are therefore between them and their service
provider - not between them and the net at large. This is an important
distinction. The relevant model is caller ID to my mind. 

Businesses pay for phone lines so that they can communicate with their
customers. Many would *like* to identify their customers phone numbers. 
But they are not *entitled* to it, and I can block caller ID and something
like 50% of people in California do have full blocking. Californians value
their privacy. 

> Some content providers (1) pressure online service providers and other
> proxy operators to give them their statistics.  Others (most) simply

> (2) disable caching intentionally.  

Interestingly, PacBell is now mounting an ad campaign bordering on the
actively mis-leading to try and get people to quit using the full blocking
option. for caller id. I would guess they are *also* receiving pressure
from their business customers to make caller id more effective than it is
now. 

> 
> (1) forces some large online service providers to run an up-to-date
> check for every file in their cache for every access, which increases
> latencies and wastes resources on their already otherwise busy
> servers, somewhat defeating the benefits that they are trying to gain
> by running proxy.

Am I missing something here? Why would large online services give *any*
information about their proxy stats to an outside group? I certainly would
not do so for Joe Q. Not My Customer.

> (2) defeats the whole caching idea.

I am getting quite close to crossing a couple of my favorite search
engines off my lists because of aggressive use of decaching to force a
*new* advert to come up everytime I do anything (ok - so maybe I will
settle for turning off graphics when I visit the search engines.)  I load
10K of search results and 20K of animated advertisement. I don't think
that *improving* caching is exactly their high-priority goal. They are
going a long way out of their way to make sure that I get the dubious
honor of seeing a *different* advertisment everytime I click on anything. 

Hmmm - here is something I think people actually *would* like. The ability
to *selectively* turn off graphics for certain sites permanently.  What a
concept - being able to visit a search engine and actually get *search
results* instead of waiting twenty seconds for an animated advert to
load. I wonder if it could be implemented in the browser proxy settings
or via a plug in... 

http://www.alta-vista.com	image-loading-off

Just like a bookmark list.  You know - I bet we could save *TONS* of
bandwidth that way. Much more than any hit metering proposal would ever
do. If a site's advertisements get too persistantly annoying: <poof>. 

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 1996 06:34:43 UTC