The meeting information is available from here:http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Propagation/Meeting/960419.html.
There are a number of problems with the current HTTP protocol. The major problem is that HTTP is more of a transaction protocol, and does not work well over a connection-oriented protocol like TCP. Scaling, latency and off-line processing are key issues.
Some folks suggest that wider use of Multicast will help with some of these problems.
A number of presentations were made.
Margo believes that web traffic/user growth is doubling each month.
The afternoon sessions featured the following discussions:
Bill asks about service guarantees and QoS. At this conference, there was considerable interest in such concepts. Bill also remarks that at least one automobile manufacturer requires reliability and contends that the current public Internet is not reliable enough for their needs.
There was no significant discussion about copyright issues. There was some discussion in the context of cacheing.