Despite the undeniable truth that Jacobson’s TCP congestion avoidance algorithm is fundamentally broken, many academics and now Net Neutrality activists along with their lawyers cling to it as if it were somehow holy and sacred. Groups like the Free Press and Vuze (a company that relies on P2P) files FCC complaints against ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like Comcast that try to mitigate the damage caused by bandwidth hogging P2P applications by throttling P2P. They wag their fingers that P2P throttling is “protocol discrimination” and that it’s a violation of the TCP standards. They tell us that if anyone slows down a P2P application, then they are somehow violating someone’s right to free speech and impinging on their civil rights.

They tell us that reining in bandwidth hogs is actually the ISP’s way of killing the video distribution competition. They tell us that P2P isn’t really a bandwidth hog and that P2P users are merely operating within their contracted peak bitrates. Never mind the fact that no network can ever support continuous peak throughput for anyone and that resources are always shared, they tell us to just throw more money and bandwidth at the problem. They continue to espouse the virtues of P2P applications as “efficient” but what they don’t tell us is that “efficient” means efficiency in bandwidth hogging. They also don’t tell us that P2P is efficient at offloading the costs of video distribution to someone else.