Thirty companies have pledged support for a new internet protocol intended to allow content providers, ISPs and ASPs to offer services such as targeted advertising, virus scanning and language translation on any internet access device, including devices such as handheld computers and PDAs. The internet content application protocol (ICAP) forum, which is being headed up by Akamai Technologies Inc and Network Appliance Inc, and has members including Cisco, Nortel and DoubleClick, will present the protocol to the internet engineering task force (IETF) early next year.
Edward Taylor, business development manager at Network Appliance, says that ICAP is intended to overcome the current problems of internet content delivery. Namely that content delivery systems do not discriminate between low and high bandwidth internet connections, nor what device is viewing the content.
The ICAP protocol builds on the GET and POST functions in the HTTP 1.1 specification. For instance, After a device, such as a Windows CE-based handheld, requests to view a web page, the protocol checks the request header and finds that it has been sent by a CE device. The request is then routed via a web page that strips out all the graphics and tags that make content difficult to view on a handheld device and sends it to the device. A very similar method could allow automatic translation of web pages into different languages.
The ICAP protocol will also allow ASPs to deliver more than just hosting services to their customers, according to Taylor. The protocol could allow the ASP to identify an embedded object in HTML, post this content to a virus engine and then report to the customer if the content was infected or not.
Akamai and Network Appliance intend to start deploying ICAP on their edge of network delivery system and internet caching engines, respectively, by the middle of next year. The process of ICAP ratification by the IETF could take a little longer. However, Taylor says that ICAP protocol can also be used by standard web sites.
