Internet DRAFT - draft-yasskin-wpack-ecosystem-effects
draft-yasskin-wpack-ecosystem-effects
Network Working Group J. Yasskin
Internet-Draft Google
Intended status: Informational October 07, 2019
Expires: April 9, 2020
Ecosystem Effects of Web Packaging
draft-yasskin-wpack-ecosystem-effects-00
Abstract
This document analyzes how Web Packaging may affect the web
ecosystem.
Note to Readers
This document has NOT been reviewed widely and probably contains lots
of mistakes.
Discussion of this draft takes place on the wpack mailing list
(wpack@ietf.org), which is archived at
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/wpack [1].
The source code and issues list for this draft can be found in
https://github.com/jyasskin/wpack-ecosystem-effects [2].
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on April 9, 2020.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2019 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. General . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Aggregators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Browsers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
5. CDNs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
6. Content Producers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
7. Other effects not necessarily related to centralization . . . 4
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
10.1. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
10.2. URIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Appendix A. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Appendix B. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1. Introduction
Web Packaging, as currently defined in
[I-D.yasskin-wpack-bundled-exchanges] and
[I-D.yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses], is a system to allow
content authored by one web origin to be retrieved in an optionally-
trustworthy way from a peer or other intermediate server. The ESCAPE
conference [3] was chartered to (among other things) look for any
increase in consolidation that might result from standardizing Web
Packaging. The known possible effects on centralization and power
imbalances, arranged by the type of service provider, and not
filtered by benefit, harm, or likelihood, follow.
2. General
o The implementation of any new technology is a smaller fraction of
a large organization's budget, which pushes toward centralization.
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3. Aggregators
o Aggregators' primary power comes from ranking: telling people that
they probably want to visit particular URLs. That's not affected
by packaging.
o Aggregators already rank based on sites' content and technology
choices. e.g. Google's promotion of HTTPS sites. Packaging can
give the aggregator more certainty about the user's experience,
which might lead to more intrusive requirements.
For example, the Google Search Carousel might be able to insist on
particular Javascript that could handle swipe gestures where they
might not be willing to rely on just having seen such JS on the
last crawl. However, packaged Javascript must also be able to
reload the page from the origin to deal with retracted content,
and that could break reliance on knowing the exact content in the
same way.
o Prefetch improves navigation speeds from aggregators that can
predict which links users will click. The ability to make that
prediction is an economy of scale which encourages centralization.
This is likely to have more effect for some kinds of aggregators
(search engines?) than others (news streams?).
4. Browsers
o Packages add pressure to have just one or a few versions of a
site's content, which might reduce publishers' willingness to
support lots of different browser engines with different features.
They'll either settle on the lowest common denominator with some
progressive enhancement or target the most popular couple engines,
which is likely to be Chromium (Google Chrome, Edge, Brave,
Samsung Internet, Opera, UC Browser, etc.) and WebKit (Safari),
disadvantaging Gecko (Firefox).
However, "we only tested in Chrome" is enough of a problem on the
online web that it's not clear how big an additional impact
packaging can have.
5. CDNs
o Adding a new kind of distribution might transfer traffic from CDNs
to large aggregators, which would reduce CDNs' revenue.
o However, CDNs will still be needed to serve URLs that users type
in, bookmark, or navigate to via same-site links, so there's
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disagreement, even among employees of CDNs, about the likely size
of this effect.
o CDNs might be able to acquire even more traffic by offering
package caches to let smaller sites take advantage of prefetching.
6. Content Producers
o If Web Packages become an additional format publishers need to
produce (https://xkcd.com/927/ [4]), that will advantage the
larger publishers who can afford the engineering to maintain lots
of formats. If instead they replace at least 2 of the existing
formats (e.g. AMP, Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles),
that'll reduce that advantage of larger publishers and contribute
to decentralization.
o If aggregators use packaging to serve a significant fraction of
content producers' bytes for free, this reduces the amount the
producers need to pay CDNs, which would allow more marginal
content producers to stay profitable, increasing diversity.
7. Other effects not necessarily related to centralization
o When an aggregator prefetches a web package, the static content
will load instantly, but ads and other dynamic content will have a
visible delay. Personalization might have a delay or might be
loaded from local storage effectively instantly. It's not clear
what ecosystem effects the changes in loading speed are likely to
have.
8. Security Considerations
This document has no security implications.
9. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
10. References
10.1. Informative References
[I-D.yasskin-http-origin-signed-responses]
Yasskin, J., "Signed HTTP Exchanges", draft-yasskin-http-
origin-signed-responses-07 (work in progress), September
2019.
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[I-D.yasskin-wpack-bundled-exchanges]
Yasskin, J., "Bundled HTTP Exchanges", draft-yasskin-
wpack-bundled-exchanges-02 (work in progress), September
2019.
10.2. URIs
[1] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/wpack
[2] https://github.com/jyasskin/wpack-ecosystem-effects
[3] https://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/escape-workshop/
[4] https://xkcd.com/927/
Appendix A. Change Log
RFC EDITOR PLEASE DELETE THIS SECTION.
Appendix B. Acknowledgements
Thanks to the ESCAPE workshop attendees for coming up with many of
the effects in this document.
Author's Address
Jeffrey Yasskin
Google
Email: jyasskin@chromium.org
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