A forum of Internet-focused companies announced a major initiative aimed at delivering value added services that leverage the Internet’s infrastructure, increasing the intelligence and flexibility of networks. The goal of the forum is the cooperative review and consideration of ideas and concepts to create an open standards-based protocol – Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) that is expected to be presented to the IETF early in 2000. The proposed standard will allow enterprises, content providers and ISPs to seamlessly conduct e-services such as targeted Web advertising, virus scanning, content filtering, data compression and language translation on any Internet access device. The ICAP Forum is hosted by Akamai Technologies and Network Appliance, and is joined by Internet companies including content delivery service providers, application and content developers, and Internet infrastructure companies. Forum members who have endorsed the drafting of the open protocol include: Allaire Corporation, Appliant, Inc., BroadVision, Cobalt Networks, Direct Hit, DoubleClick, eBuilt, eColor, Engage, Entera, Exodus, Finjan Software, Frictionless Commerce, Globix, Google, Inc., Idiom, Inc., InfoLibria, Ingeniux, iWeb.com, Inc., Lionbridge Technologies, Network Associates, Novell, N2H2, Open Market, Optibase, Oracle Corp., Pandesic, Predictive Networks, Rulespace, Secure Computing, SightPath, Trend Micro, Inc., Vignette Corporation, Websense, and WWWhoosh. Additional partners are welcome and can join by sending email to partners@i-cap.org. The development of ICAP is only an example of the specific work under way by participants in the forum, with an objective to have a draft for review (prior to submitting to the IETF) at the group’s first meeting on February 14 in San Francisco. The first value added services solutions are expected to reach the marketplace in Q1 2000. www.i-cap.org.