[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Randy Bush]

generally agree except for two points

> So let me suggest that the nice thing about the Internet is that in 
> general, the core of the network doesn't care about the details of the 
> end-to-end protocols that users deploy in their machines.
> 
> There is much anxiety about "congestion control" and "fairness", of 
> course.  But ultimately, the network , the IETF, and the access 
> providers that provide the last 10 meters are not the arbiters of such 
> things. (in fact, the point is that the end users collectively have much 
> more knowledge about what they are trying to do than the network 
> routers, owners, and standardizers ever can).  Thus, the end users 
> ultimately get involved in the definition of what's fair, once they've 
> paid for the right to originate packets to each other.
> 
> Yeah, if the end users decide to get in fights among themselves, they 
> get into fights.  It's simple as that.  It's no different than Pakistan 
> or Kenya today.   If enough of the people decide that they want to have 
> a civil war, the government is not going to stop them.

given that people are being murdered, i do not look at kenya, pakistan, 
iraq, ... as positive examples.

> Fortunately, people are generally sensible after a while.   Companies 
> like Microsoft and projects like Linux generally can help by not 
> creating self-sustaining catastrophic protocol structures and 
> disseminatng them.   But generally they don't for long.

as someone trying to get microsoft to fix their seriously show-stopping 
bug that winxp with v6 turned on refuses to use v6 for dns transport, 
this is not one of my more optimistic days on this front.  "buy vista" 
my ass; we have O(10^6) winxp customer users out there.

> Bluetooth and WiFi protocols were at risk of jamming each other.  But 
> realizing that that would not do anyone any good, they came up with a 
> pragmatic set of ameliorations.   Those were hardly "optimum", but in 
> practice they worked well enough.
> 
> If CUBIC turns out to be an actual nightmare, Linux has ways to 
> distribute updates that ameliorate the problem.   I doubt it will get 
> that bad in practice - Linux users are still pretty thin, and they do 
> tend to download and apply patches much more rapidly than any other 
> class of system users on the planet.

randy