Re: Comments on Content Transformation Guidelines?

Sullivan, Bryan wrote:
> To clarify, I'm not making any claim of superiority for the
> quality/reliability of transcoding vs non-transcoding. There are always
> value judgements occuring when we consider such tradeoffs, and your
> assessment will be different from mine.
>
> But the value of transcoding as a tool is similar to why many people buy
> on credit: you could say that if we were perfect we would be excellent
> money makers/managers and never need credit. But we are not perfect, and
> markets have undoubtably grown because the users were provided that
> "service", regardless of what it's meant to our ability to learn money
> management skills.
>
> The 95+ percent of users who have mobile browsers that are not "whole
> web" capable are currently shutout of accessing anything but the "mobile
> web". I don't think anyone is expecting the CT Guidelines to be anything
> but an aid for increased web penetration, as we transition to "whole
> web" capable browsers. That transition is likely to take a few more
> years, thus there is time for value to be gained from vendor and service
> provider investment in these types of services. Otherwise the BPWG
> members would not be spending their resources supporting this work.
>   
I think we are approaching the core of the problem. You write:

 > The 95+ percent of users who have mobile browsers that are not "whole
 > web" capable are currently shutout of accessing anything but the "mobile
 > web".

What users want does not matter here. Nor does what operators want 
matter here (let alone what transcoder vendors want). The only thing 
that matters is the will of content owners. A content owner is investing 
time and money to set up their web (and mobile web) sites. They do this 
hoping that their sites will be successful and that they can survive in 
their business. In this effort, they have the right to control what gets 
delivered to their users.
Of course, they are successful only as long as their users are happy 
with the service and the service is popular, but this cannot be taken as 
an excuse by operators to steal their content and repurpose it in the 
name of users. Users have a choice about whether they will access the 
service or not.

Now, having said this, I think a compromise may be found over opt-in 
services (opera-mini, skweezer, google). But placing a transcoder in the 
middle of each HTTP connection is not acceptable. Transcoding HTTPS is 
more than not acceptable. It is unconceivable.

Luca

Received on Tuesday, 5 August 2008 00:02:18 UTC