But unlike the phone system, the Internet has no Ma Bell or FCC to mandate new policies for the entire system. Not even Microsoft can make us all upgrade our routers. Multicasting is such an obviously good idea that it seems hard to believe it won't gradually work its way onto the Net, providing a more simple, obvious method to keep traffic down than all the caching, compression, and proxy schemes combined. All we need do is get enough service providers to adopt a common protocol that works for the kind of data we really ship on the Internet, and make the investment to support it. Talk back to Paul Boutin in his column's Threads .
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