Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:
> I'm struck that much of the discussion is about the Web as it is today in
> 2015. Just 10 or 15 years ago, the ration of costs of long haul to local
> networks was such that many organizations (e.g. my employer at the time,
> IBM) ran proxies near the corporate/public Internet boundary, and perhaps
> elsewhere internally also. In many parts of the world that cost ratio has
> changed such that proxies are less important, and we are engaged in a debate
> as to whether they need no longer be well supported by the Web architecture.
> Question: what is our level of confidence that in future years technology
> changes won't alter the cost ratios to make proxies desirable once again?

FWIW, I think that this question is morally even less persuasive than
movies on a "remote island". I think it's easier to sympathize with
the notion of having a shared cache because it's truly infeasibly
expensive to make a radio uplink from a remote place wider or
lower-latency than to sympathize with the notion that users of the Web
should be more surveillable in order to maybe again in the future to
be able to save a buck that can be pocketed as profit when it's about
optimizing the cost of fiber optic-based network usage.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

Received on Thursday, 15 January 2015 14:37:56 UTC