I wasn't familiar with the term, but that looks terrifying from a net neutrality standpoint. Deep packet inspection wouldn't even be needed to sort traffic, no?

I wasn't familiar with the term, but that looks terrifying from a net neutrality standpoint. Deep packet inspection wouldn't even be needed to sort traffic, no? Also, making the network content-aware to a greater degree gives me nightmares of bloated XML / WS-I style schemas making their way into core specs. That said, your points are a definite need with the size of the modern network (and the order of magnitude difference in traffic spikes). Imho, it'd be great to have a more formalized caching system, whereby the server could tag content as recommended-cache (core page content) or not (comment threads) & invalidate asynchronously if it became necessary. I'd be interested to see what we could do with SSDs / future technology with feasible latencies to assemble such a system. Hypothetically, there's no reason it couldn't be incentivized via a peering-style agreement: e.g. I cached and served X amount of traffic that you didn't have to, therefore you'll pay me Y% of the cost of you serving that traffic yourself (where Y < 100% & it still makes sense for both parties).