[11175] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: What is an "Internet reseller"?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Thu Mar 24 01:37:56 1994
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 94 10:43:14 EST
From: stpeters@swan-song.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: matthew@echo.com, karl@mcs.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
>From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
>> So, why, if I'm a host provider who allows the use of Mosaic by my customers
>> using the new WWW-proxy software on my Unix host they dial into at 14kbps,
>> don't I need to become a CIX member?
>>
>> -matthew
>
>You do need to. Your use of a device to make it APPEAR that the packets
>originate at your machine (they don't -- they originate at your customer's
>machines) doesn't change the real facts of the case.
Karl, the WWW-proxy doesn't work at the packet level; it works at the
client-server transaction level. Mosaic sends the proxy an http
request for a URL. The proxy then fetches the URL and sends it back
to Mosaic.
The older proxy actually even reformatted the results into HTML and
sent the HTML to Mosaic. (The new proxy [beta] is MIME-compliant and
sends the MIME-content data back to Mosaic.)
If the URL is an ftp URL, the proxy and ftp server use two separate
connections (ftp and ftp-data), but Mosaic uses only one with the proxy.
There is clearly no one-to-one packet relationship here, not necessarily
even any approximate packet correspondence. This is more like real time
email.
In this case, it's getting very hard to argue that the packets don't
originate with the proxy.
--
Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, The Pearly Gateway; currently at:
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
