Re: [tsvwg] dispute (Re: Results of consensus call on ECT(1) usage)

[Sebastian Moeller <[e-mail]>]

Hallo Lars,


> On May 22, 2020, at 16:25, Lars Eggert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 2020-5-22, at 16:35, Rodney W. Grimes <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> We were never given a ?none of the above? choice.
>> 
>> Which was actually itemized by the IETF Chair Alisha Cooper at the
>> very end of the Interim Meeting, I was rather shocked to not see
>> it as an option, and hench my vote was made with a comment that
>> I had been "boxed into a choice."
> 
> you can always refrain from responding to the poll?
> 
> Lars

[SM] Sue that is an option. If L4S would have been designed without side-effects for non-L4S traffic, I would happily ignored both the discussion and the poll. The fact of the matter is, that IMHO L4S will not achieve its stated goals (because its goals are considerably too ambitious, and its developers, ever the optimists, never bothered to actually test their design under even mildly adversarial conditions, what can go wrong?). 
	To add insult to injury, L4S will not only not work as promised, but it will also introduce a nice and juicy new DOS target (the LL-queue can be disrupted with simple bursts of traffic, no sustained overload necessary, try catching that with "circuit-breakers" and similar heuristics).
	As stated before, all this for essentially potentially ~1 ms of latency-under-load-increase instead of 5-10ms (as compared to the current state of the art, even still using 1/sqrt(p) CC signaling), so rather modest gains for rather unpleasant side-effects. 
	In short, a decision important enough to participate in even after the WG restricted the choices to a sub-optimal selection, since the outcome of the WG decision might affect all internet users in the future. 
	If I would not know better, I would feel that the poll got the outcome it was designed to yield; but we knew that before, there are companies that already invested in L4S and hence there are already vested interests in it proceeding along the standardization path. And to be explicit I see nothing nefarious in that, but it is not the best conditions under which to ask an engineering question about how to use ECT(1) in the future.
	
Interestingly almost nobody of those voicing their support for ECT(1) as input now, had contributed in the past when we discussed the short-comings of L4S and nobody volunteered empiric data supporting the L4S hypothesis that the criticism was overblown.

Best Regards
	Sebastian