After a year of dragging its feet on instant messaging interoperability, AOL has submitted a proposal for an open instant messaging architecture to the Internet engineering community for consideration as an industry standard.
AOL's submission comes just days after it was revealed that Federal Trade Commission antitrust investigators are examining AOL's dominance of instant messaging as part of their review of AOL's merger with Time Warner.
AOL submitted its proposal for an open, worldwide instant messaging system to the Internet Engineering Task Force on June 15, just meeting the group's deadline for protocol submissions. At least five other proposals were submitted, including one authored by Fujitsu engineers and another by a team that includes researchers from Microsoft and Cisco. The IETF's leadership will review all of the submitted protocols and make them publicly available on June 25.
"The proposals will be reviewed, in a closed group, and then on the mailing list," says Patrik Faltstrom, chair of the IETF's Applications area, which oversees instant messaging standardization efforts. "Hopefully, we can agree on one proposal to be the basis for future discussions."
Faltstrom says people submitting proposals usually believe that their own protocol is the best and hope that it will be chosen. "The most important message is that AOL is committing to the public review process of the IETF," Falstrom adds. AOL "believes that if the people in the IETF end up with rough consensus around a protocol, that it will be a good one - regardless if it is theirs or not."
AOL's proposal outlines a server-to-server approach to instant messaging interoperability that is similar to how Internet e-mail works. AOL says its system will allow users of any two instant messaging networks to use the same protocols to communicate with each other. It also would allow users to keep their existing screen names.
From a security perspective, AOL's proposal requires users to register with only one instant messaging system and ensures that their passwords and log-in IDs would not be shared with any other system. Other security precautions that AOL has taken would protect instant messages from being easily intercepted or spoofed, and AOL has made its architecture flexible enough to support encryption. In addition, AOL's architecture allows individual networks to use firewalls for additional security protection.
"We think that this submission represents a significant first step toward developing more detailed protocols for implementing the kind of full interoperability that we would all like to see," AOL stated on its Web site, where it posted links to the IETF submissions.
AOL stated that it is important not to release detailed interoperability proposals until security precautions can be taken. "Once protocols are published, they will be used by hackers and spammers as a roadmap to plan their attacks," AOL's Web site says.
Rivals criticized AOL's proposal for lacking these details.
"What they've submitted is just an outline for how [interoperability] would work in the future," says Alex Diamandis, vice president of alliance marketing at Odigo, a New York-based instant messaging vendor whose traffic has been blocked by AOL off and on since last Saturday. "We treat this with a healthy dose of skepticism. [AOL] has been claiming they were in favor of creating interoperability for upwards of two years now."
With 120 million users of its AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ products, AOL accounts for 90% of the instant messaging market. AOL has agreements with Lotus, Novell and FaceTime Communications that allow their instant messaging systems to work together, but AOL has blocked instant messaging traffic from Microsoft, AT&T, Tribal Voice and others. These spurned companies have taken their complaints to Washington, asking Congress, the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission to examine what they consider to be monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior on AOL's part.
AOL's proposal is at: aim.aol.com/openim
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