The ICAP Forum of Internet companies today announced the completion of the first draft of a protocol aimed at enabling Internet e-services. The new protocol, Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP), leverages the Internet’s infrastructure and increases the intelligence and flexibility of networks. ICAP will be submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) Web Replication and Caching (WREC) working group as an Internet draft at the next WREC meeting. The proposed standard allows enterprises, content providers and ISPs to seamlessly conduct e-services such as Web page reformatting, targeted Web advertising, virus scanning, content filtering, data compression and language translation from any Internet access device. The ICAP Forum is hosted by Akamai Technologies and Network Appliance, and is joined by content delivery service providers, application developers, and Internet infrastructure companies. Forum members participating in the development of ICAP include: AdForce, Advertising.com, Allaire Corporation, Anystream, Appliant, Inc., BroadVision, Capella, Cidera, Cobalt Networks, Compaq, Direct Hit, DoubleClick, eBuilt, Ecliptic, eColor, Engage, Entera, Finjan Software, Fresher Information, Frictionless Commerce, Gomez, Google, Idiom, Idini, iKnowledge, InfoLibria, Ingeniux, iWeb.com, Izar, Kanda Software, Lionbridge Technologies, Mirror Image Internet, Navisite, Network Associates, Novell, N2H2, Oki, Open Market, Optibase, Oracle Corp., Pandesic, Predictive Networks, PictureWorks, RuleSpace, Secure Computing, SightPath, StarBurst Software, Symantec Corp., Trend Micro, Inc., Vignette Corporation, Websense, and WWWhoosh. Instructions on how to participate in development of the protocol are available at www.i-cap.org. With the first version of ICAP now complete, the Internet community is invited to prototype e-services offerings using ICAP and provide feedback on the protocol at comments@i-cap.org. Central to the ICAP concept is a simple, yet powerful, open protocol that enables communication between edge content devices (i.e. Web caches and Internet content delivery servers), and application servers that modify content and then deliver it to Internet access devices. For example, when a Web cache receives a request from a cell phone browser, the cache will deliver the requested content to an application server that adapts the content for display on the cell phone. The cache serves the page, and caches it for subsequent cell phone browsers. This allows a very high degree of flexibility on the types of services that can be offered at access points while maintaining the high performance and integrity of the access servers. www.i-cap.org