What can be done to prevent the spread of WAP? There are several possible steps that in principle could be taken:
One possibility would be to work with the WAP Forum - to engage them in a dialogue, and try to persuade them to correct the procedural problems described in Section 2. Among other things, this would require that they establish an open working group for maintenance of the protocol, initiate RFC publication of the protocol, and make every effort to lift all patent restrictions from the protocol.
However, this would amount to a complete reversal of the WAP Forum's mission and values, and it is naive to imagine that this is possible. At this point, we regard the WAP Forum as being beyond redemption.
This also leaves aside the question of what to do about the technical deficiencies of WAP - even with the WAP Forum's complete cooperation, a major effort would be required to create a sound engineering solution. Working to reform the WAP Forum, therefore, is not a useful approach.
Given that we can expect no help from the WAP Forum, the most useful thing that can be done quickly and easily is to spread the word about WAP. It is for this purpose that this exposé has been written.
Please join us in letting it be widely known that WAP is a trap. You may freely make and distribute copies of this article, provided the copyright and permission notices are preserved. You are encouraged to bring this article to the attention of the appropriate persons within your organization.
Rejecting WAP at engineering level means working to prevent WAP from being adopted in the design of devices and systems. This is primarily the responsibility of the engineering community within the wireless industry.
It is the responsibility of design engineers to evaluate the controversy surrounding WAP, and decide for themselves whether or not it is a sound engineering solution. If as an engineer you decide that it is not, then we encourage you to inform your manager of this, justify your position on technical grounds, and recommend alternatives.
To provide support for this, the Free Protocols Foundation maintains a set of informational resources on its website at http://www.freeprotocols.org/harmOfWap/main.html. These resources include references to various other papers and articles which corroborate the fraudulence of WAP. Please feel free to use these materials in any way you wish. We also invite you to contribute to the information pool at the Free Protocols Foundation - any comments, articles or other information may be submitted to the FPF via our website.
Rejecting WAP at consumer level means encouraging the end-users of hand-held wireless devices to refuse to purchase WAP devices - in other words, to boycott these devices.
However, the WAP question is a very complex technical and business issue, and it is not easy to convince the consumer that this is something worth caring about. A successful boycott requires an immediate, gut-level understanding of the issues on the part of the consumer. The WAP issue is not something that can easily be condensed into a ten-second sound bite.
In any case, WAP is not sufficiently widespread for a boycott to be effective. For these reasons we do not consider a consumer boycott to be a useful approach at this point. For the moment, WAP must be dealt with by the industry, not the consumer.
Regardless of the shortcomings of WAP, the fact remains that at some point the wireless industry must agree upon a standard protocol for efficient data communications. Ultimately, therefore, WAP can be displaced only by the adoption of a suitable alternative.
One traditional source of Internet protocols is the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF. To our knowledge, however, the IETF does not currently have a working group assigned to this task, and so no protocol can be expected from them in the near future. Even if the IETF were to assign a working group to this immediately, it typically takes 18 months to achieve a workable first-draft protocol. This time frame is far too long to address the industry's immediately pressing need.
Other traditional sources of protocols are private industry, and the academic community. However, thus far a suitable protocol has been forthcoming from neither of these sources. Although there is general consensus within the industry that an alternative protocol to WAP is desperately needed, no such protocol has yet been publicly proposed.
In this article, we would like to be the first to present an alternative: LEAP, the Lightweight and Efficient Application Protocol. LEAP is immediately available, and has all the characteristics required to displace WAP and become the basis of an industry standard. A brief description of LEAP is provided in the following section.
To the best of our knowledge, LEAP is the only viable alternative to WAP. However, we invite readers of this article to seek out and bring to our attention any other alternatives that may exist. At the Free Protocols Foundation, we are ready to support and publicize any viable, patent-free alternative to WAP that is made known to us. Such alternative protocols will be referenced at the FPF website at http://www.FreeProtocols.org, and included in future revisions of this article.
In summary, the best ways to prevent the harm of WAP are to spread the word, reject WAP at engineering level, and adopt alternatives. We encourage readers of this article to join us in opposing WAP in all of these ways.