[e2e] Open the floodgate

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: "Christian Huitema" <huitema at windows.microsoft.com>

    > The problem with a strict transport-layer approach is that transport
    > actors may well have an incentive to cheat and maximize their immediate
    > satisfaction ...
    > If you want an approach that resists gaming, you probably need to
    > involve the network.

I'm not a priori against adding such function, but neither am I a priori for
it. I've heard this reasoning before, and it has a certain amount of
plausibility. Then again, the argument about voice needing to bound delay
jitter sounds plausible too, but people seem to be deploying packet voice
without ubiquitous deployment of IntServ.

Part of the reason I'm a bit dubious is that it seems to me that in the
contemporary network, at least, congestion is most likely to happen at the
ends, most likely on the drop to the individual host. If so, you'd only be
protecting people against themselves. The network core is not congested,
nor congestable through anything but a massive DDoS attack.

Still, maybe it's the right thing, but that's really a separate point from
confusing error and congestion drops.


    > you would want to implement a response function in the network where
    > abuse of a congested link would lead to a lesser goodput than playing
    > by the rules.

Yes, but you don't have to get the end-end involved to make that kind of
thing happen. People have devised drop functions for routers that do this,
without any explicit interaction with the transport layer, IIRC.

	Noel