A Fairer, Faster Internet

Abstract

The Internet is founded on a very simple premise: shared communications links are more efficient than dedicated channels that lie idle much of the time. And so we share. We share local area networks at work and neighborhood links from home. And then we share again - at any given time, a terabit backbone cable is shared among thousands of folks surfing the Web, downloading videos, and talking on Internet phones. But there's a profound flaw in the protocol that governs how people share the Internet's capacity. The protocol allows you to seem to be polite, even as you elbow others aside, taking far more resources than they do. Rather than patching over the problem, the author has worked out how to fix the root cause: the Internet's sharing protocol itself. It turns out that this solution will make the Internet not just simpler but much faster too.