Removal of accounting from scenarios

["Phil Rzewski" <philr@inktomi.com>]

As mentioned in the previous note, in the newly published Scenarios update
(<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-day-cdnp-scenarios-04.txt>http:
//www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-day-cdnp-scenarios-04.<http://www.ietf
.org/internet-drafts/draft-day-cdnp-scenarios-04.txt>txt), I deleted the
previous Section 4, which had details on accounting.

As a first exercise, I'd like to ask that people do an open-minded reading of
the new Scenarios draft, pretending that you never saw the old Section 4
before. When you're done, are you left with a hollow feeling wondering about
business models? :)

Ok, that exercise aside, I could put the text back fully intact if that's
what's desired. However, in trying to make updates to it, I realized the
following things:

1) In the past year, we've almost never made reference to those accounting
scenarios in our discussions on the list or at the BOFs.

2) The other drafts also make little-to-no reference to the topics described in
the accounting scenarios section.

3) Some would argue that, because they describe business models, they don't
really belong in an IETF discussion/draft anyway.

Re: point "3", I do think that some understanding of business models can help
make the motivation of our work clearer. That being said, I'd like to propose
that we rebuild any statements we make about business models from the ground
up, especially in light of the different state of the CDN market and the
economy since a year ago when Scenarios was first drafted.

Recall that the previous draft made reference to the key assumptions: "Content
Has Value", "Distribution Has Value", and "Clients Have Value". Then, in what
could be seen as a zoom-in on the "Content Has Value" case, there were
descriptions of payment scenarios: "Cable Scenario", "Telco Scenario", "Ticket
Scenario", and "Calling Card Scenario".

To provide a straw man of how to replace this as simply/briefly as possible,
I'd like to instead propose that we fundamentally stress the "Distribution Has
Value" case. This is to say, the functions provided by a CN (which really
consists of all of RR/D/A) are, by nature, a service (much like bandwidth in
the lower-stack universe), and so there's going to be a cost associated with
that service, regardless of the content flowing across it. This implies that
there's almost certainly going to be some money flow toward the party doing the
distribution. I think this is reflected in things like our accounting drafts,
where our accounting is centered primarily around records that indicate whether
the enlisted CN did its job: What did you distribute? What requests do you
route? It's material for the originating CN to look at and determine "Did I get
the service I paid for?"

I'd like to propose that we simply make the assumption that "Content Has Value"
will be handled in one place: DRM. This is to say, if the publisher or
originating CN wants to attach rules of use to the content (e.g. style of
choice: cable, telco, ticket, calling card) they're going to wrap that into
some DRM mechanism, and they're going to take the responsibility for collecting
on that. Perhaps the DRM would allow them to delegate authority to collect to
some other party, who may in fact be another CN. However, what I want to
propose is that such delegation not be a component of CDI (i.e. the "tree" for
delegation of authority to collect on valuable content should not map directly
onto the "tree" for delegation of distribution of content).

A third thing we can briefly describe is the ad-revenue model. I think we all
grok that one pretty well.

With these as a basis, the business scenarios are pretty simple:

Basis: Distribution typically will always have some cost associated with it,
but anyone enlisting distribution services is going to then have another
strategy for recouping their costs.

1) One way to recoup these costs is to wrap one's valuable content in DRM to
define rules of use. Therefore, costs are recouped by collecting on fees for
use of content. The attachment of DRM to content and delegation of authority
for collecting fees is out of the scope of CDI.

2) Another way is to attach advertisements to one's content. Therefore, costs
are recouped by collecting fees from third parties that supplied the
advertisements. It's assumed that the accounting data (e.g. usage logs)
collected from an internetworked set of CNs could be used as the basis for
billing a third-party advertising entity, though how this is done is out of the
scope of CDI.

What do people think?

--
Phil Rzewski - Senior Architect - Inktomi Corporation                  
650-653-2487 (office) - 650-303-3790 (cell) - 650-653-1848 (fax)