Universite catholique de Louvain Alcatel Bell The Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO) problem is being discussed within the IETF and more globally by the research community and some enterprises. In this memo, we argue that it is important to conceive general-purpose mechanisms to solve this problem. By general-purpose we say not only application independent but also layer independent mechanism. The generality can be obtained because the underlying problem is the same regardless the application or the layer.