Personalized content is provided over a communications network such as the Internet. Providing personalized content includes both generating content which depends on the recipient of that content and delivering that content in a manner that depends on the recipient. Although methods of providing personalized content are known, none of those methods provide a mechanism for deciding when and how to personalize content. By enabling a content provided to send policy data to local caches and having a local agent computer arrange for content files to be delivered in accordance with those policy files, such a mechanism is provided.