A leading Internet consultant is taking issue with America Online Inc.‘s practice of caching Web
pages.
John Robb, a principal at technology research firm Gomez Advisors,
recently wrote a column for the GomezWire Soapbox
accusing AOL of being the worst offender of server proxy cache theft in
the industry.
Robb said America Online’s aggressive proxy system essentially takes
the product of one company and gives it to another for free.
“AOL’s proxy cache system has been a problem for years. Now that AOL has
emerged as the dominant Internet access route of consumer choice, it’s
becoming a very serious issue.”
Robb estimates that between 40 and 50 percent of a company’s Web site
traffic is stolen by AOL’s proxy cache servers. A proxy cache is a copy of
a Web site that resides on a company’s intermediate server. Page views are
not received by the actual web site, but by the cached version on the
server.
AOL spokeswoman Tricia Primrose defended the company’s practice.
“We cache to improve our member experience, to serve up pages more quickly
and to compensate for the fact that many Web sites really don’t have
adequate bandwidth to serve up their content to an AOL-sized audience.”
Primrose said there are HTML protocols that allow a web site to
determine how often their site must be refreshed. If a particular Web
site
owner believes that their traffic is being stolen, they could certainly
re-set these protocols.
“AOL doesn’t sell advertising based on the page views to these sites, so
we are not stealing their hits,” she said.
Primrose AOL believes caching does not violate copyright laws since a site
owner can easily prevent AOL from caching their web pages or program the
pages to be constantly refreshed.
Robb believes that a class action suit by of Web site owners will resolve
the proxy server issue with AOL. However, Robb added “if AOL posted the
information on what users are doing at their Web site to the site owners,
there would not be an issue of page view theft to pursue.”
