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The past decade has seen a great deal of effort invested in developing multicast technology for the Internet. Unfortunately, early excitement about multicast has given way to frustration with the challenges of designing and deploying a scalable multicast service. The reaction to the slow deployment of multicast has been an explosion in different implementation techniques designed for specific applications. None of these new services have been widely deployed. As a result, multicast technology is complex and confusing to application writers. To address this complexity, we argue for development of a multicast session layer. By decoupling the service model and programming interface from the underlying implementation, this new layer simultaneously simplifies the development of multicast applications and eases the deployment of new multicast technology. We outline the case for a multicast session layer and discuss principles for its design.