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To: Scott C. Lemon who wrote (1555)	5/19/1999 10:06:00 AM
From: Thomas	Respond to of 5853

Hi Scott, Thanks for the response. I had not intended to cause offense, but I am glad that my post elicited such an excellent and informative response. Your telephone network analogy for intelligent networks is a point well taken, however, I am still concerned that the introduction of additional intelligence into the network and widespread caching will have two deleterious effects. First, by introduction of proprietary intelligence into the core of the network, the ubiquity and equal access that has made the Internet such a phenom would seem to be at risk (could someone design and deploy an ICQ "killer app" from a remote of the world, if they did not understand the implications of MPLS or whatever?). Second, the growth of caching and overlay networks both seem to risk the de-democratization of content delivery, in that well-financed content providers will be able to pay for turbocharging of their content so that their content presents a more compelling (faster loading) experience for the end user, possibly at the expense of actually slowing the load times of non-turbocharged content (if the caching effort consumes some bandwidth that would otherwise have been available to the user). I am not saying that a content provider should be precluded from paying for his content to be better positioned on someone's network, but merely pointing out that there are MSFT-like gorilla risks out there in content land. Thanks again for your insightful post. Cheers, Thomas