Re: [Congress] CONGRESS is about ready to go

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

On 2/23/2023 5:14 PM, Matt Mathis wrote:
> I should have used a different word.  I meant tools in a BCP standards 
> sense - a citable document that can be used to scold developers and 
> corporations  who carelessly deploy large scale systems that are capable 
> of serving enough data to DDOS entire countries.   I have heard rumors 
> of at least 3 such events.
> 
> It would be better if we told application designers that they MUST do 
> their part to prevent congestion collapse and that transport can't fix 
> some design flaws.

Of course, we have no protocol police. For example, nobody asked 
permission from the IETF to deploy Cubic and make the buffer-bloat issue 
even bigger than it was with Reno. Nobody asked for permission from the 
IETF before deciding that running 6 TCP connections in parallel was a 
fine way to speed up the loading of web pages.

In theory, we could encourage "enforcement by network effects". For 
example, servers could (perhaps) detect that a peer is requesting way 
too many TCP connections in parallel, or stopping and resuming its QUIC 
connections too frequently, and "do something about it". Or, Active 
Queue Managers in the network might detect that a particular flow is 
causing congestion or long queues at the bottleneck and "do something 
about it".

That's something worth thinking about. A BCP might detail the kind of 
enforcement that is considered legit, providing servers admin or AQM 
system with some kind of guidelines. And then, the resulting enforcement 
might make the Internet better for everybody. Maybe.

It is also a clear recipe for ossification. That, and the possibility of 
getting it wrong, make writing any such recommendation rather dangerous. 
Not that this has ever stopped the deployment of middle boxes...

-- Christian Huitema