IETF answers critics of proposed Web content altering technology
 
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SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - The Internet Engineering Task Force is forging ahead with plans to develop a standard approach for network intermediaries such as proxy servers to personalize, translate or otherwise alter Web content, despite concerns that such a standard could be used to make unauthorized changes to Web pages.
In light of those concerns, however, the IETF's leadership recently issued guidelines for this standardization effort, saying that a Web publisher or end user must request any content changes and that both parties must be able to trace changes and view unaltered content.
The technology in question is Open Pluggable Edge Services (OPES), a new class of Web services similar to today's content delivery networks and caching systems that speed up the delivery of Web pages. OPES devices would be attached to these caching systems to provide Web publishers with a variety of add-on services, such as reducing the size of Web pages to fit handheld devices or slowing multimedia streams for low-bandwidth connections.
Companies pushing the OPES concept include AT&T, CacheFlow, CacheWare, IBM, Intel, Lucent and Nortel Networks. These companies want to develop an industry standard to ensure that OPES devices from different vendors can communicate with each other across the Internet.
The IETF held its fourth meeting about OPES here Tuesday, and about 200 people participated. The next step is for OPES proponents to get approval from the IETF leadership to form an official working group. That could happen within weeks, IETF participants say.
Ned Freed, one of the IETF's Application Area directors and a distinguished engineer with Sun, says it is the opinion of the IETF leadership that the new guidelines provide "the necessary framework for moving ahead with this working group."
OPES has been criticized by groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which worried that the IETF would create an open standard for the unauthorized manipulation of Web content. The new guidelines have alleviated many of these concerns about how OPES would affect the integrity, security and privacy of Web content.
"We're very pleased with the progress that's been made to date," says John Morris, director of CDT's Internet standards, technology and policy project. "But clearly a lot of work still needs to be done. There are a lot of outstanding issues about how and when to do notifications and whether the... guidelines are optional."
Morris says the new guidelines outline critical issues that the OPES working group must either solve or explain carefully why they cannot or should not be solved.
"But even if every [guideline] is addressed and solved, there's still a non-trivial potential for misuse of OPES services," Morris says. "We will be watching this closely."
OPES backers say the technology could provide valuable services to corporate network managers, including virus scanning, dynamic content assembly and content filtering. The goal of OPES is to enable these services in the network via proxy servers to improve performance and usability.
"Our corporate customers want to do a more rich mixing of content both for their public presence on the Internet and for their intranet," says Gary Tomlinson, author of one of the OPES documents and the CTO of CacheFlow. But if these types of OPES services aren't standardized, "enterprise customers won't like it," he adds.
Michael Condry, co-chair of the OPES effort and director of network edge technology for Intel's Internet and Communications Lab, says OPES has been a lightening rod for debate about an overall shift in the Internet architecture that is resulting in more intermediary devices between Web servers and end users.
"We've been shaking up the views of the Internet architecture and where the network is going," Condry says.
Condry is optimistic that the OPES working group will be chartered, and he expects the group's development effort to take about a year. He sees broad applicability of the OPES concept as it creates an application-level overlay network on top of the Internet.
"There's a big hole in the whole Web services area," Condry says. "OPES is an opportunity to bridge the characteristics and requirements of the network with the characteristics and requirements of the applications."
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