ATIS is looking to help members in the web ecosystem tackle the emerging HTTP 2.0 concept with the debut of its Open Web Alliance (OWA), an initiative focused on addressing the impact of closed proxies such as those that incorporate the SPDY protocol, which is designed to help reduce the latency of web pages.
The organization is focused on developing requirements for an open service optimization proxy while supporting necessary encryption and privacy for Internet consumers.
Unlike the early days of the Internet where web pages were static, today's websites are far more complex.
"Fast forward to today when you click on a single web page, you're probably accessing upwards of a hundred different sites ... Each have their own sessions established with them," said Jim McEachern, senior technology consultant for ATIS, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "That combined with the very graphic intensive side of the content has an impact on performance and the protocols aren't optimized for that current reality."
Developed by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), SPDY has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization as HTTP 2.0, which ATIS said is set to be proposed as a new standard in November.
Although SPDY has the benefit of reducing Internet site latency by redirecting Internet traffic through a single opaque tunnel across the network, ATIS said this bundling could hinder reasonable network management, content distribution and network services.
"The problem is if you take all of that traffic and you bundle into one opaque tunnel, and it's opaque because you encrypt the entire tunnel, it looks to the network like a single fat pipe that goes through and the service provider can't see anything about where it is ultimately going to," McEachern said. "All of those value added services and functions it is providing can no longer can be provided because they have this invisible flow of traffic going through the network."
What's more, the SPDY proxy also could "break" existing content delivery optimization mechanisms used by service providers, which would degrade service quality for consumers.
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