Voda in the middle
At first, it looks like Vodafone were trying to enable more mobile access to the Web. Without much warning, they installed a Novarra transcoding server to intercept their customers’ traffic to the Web, and deliver a version of the content that is supposed to be better for the mobile device. All very well, until the proxy encounters a site that is already perfect for mobile devices. Such a site, having been crafted to the point of pure perfection for any mobile device that requests content from it, is suddenly faced with a request from the Novarra proxy. This proxy gives the impression that it is a desktop browser, and reveals nothing of the true nature of the mobile device that made the original request. Thus the adapting site returns a desktop presentation, which is promptly mangled by the new Vodafone proxy.
The end result is a moderate improvement for the customer experience of legacy Web content, potential man-in-the-middle issues for anyone concerned about security/privacy, and a very negative impact on any sites that have gone to the trouble of offering a Web experience that is tailored to the delivery context.
The proposed answer (from Vodafone) to these problems is to white-list any site that doesn’t want their interaction with the client to be intercepted, and to give the end user the option (via some means of which I have no experience) to opt-out of the new service. Somehow, given the global nature of the Web, I can’t see the white-list working too well. It’s bad enough that you have to wait a few hours to get a new DNS entry to update around the Net, but now we’re expect to register sites with Vodafone too? What if all the other operators start stepping into the middle? Will there be a charge for being white-listed? Will they charge per request? Will this be a mobile Web tax?
No. White-listing will not work. New sites may be able to add metadata (e.g. like the robots.txt file) to their sites to alert proxies to their adaptive nature, but this will only work if the proxies are upgraded to obey such metadata (and to cache it to avoid excessive server loads). Alternatively, the DNS TXT records could be extended to include the metadata.
Google Wireless Transcoder, InfoGin (AOL Mobile) and more. There are many intermediate proxies for making Web content accessible to mobile devices, and they will all need to be upgraded to respect the needs of the designed-for-mobile sites. I like these services. If there’s a site on the Web that doesn’t work well on my mobile device, I’ll opt-in to use one of the transcoders to see if that improves things. Usually it does. Never perfect, but usually enough for me to find what I need. What I would not like is being pressured into using a transcoder, even though the site I want to visit is already customised for mobile and I know for certain that the transcoder will destroy my mobile Web experience.
That’s my personal opinion, anyway. I hope they sort it out soon, as there’s a lot of unhappiness out there.
As for the rights and wrongs of putting something into the middle of an interaction between customer and provider, I’ll leave that to others to ponder.
Categorised as: Uncategorized