TCP Sucks

  The solution is for the end user to intervene, and tell all
  their applications to not be such pigs, and use uTP instead
  of TCP. Then they’ll have the same transfer rates they
  started out with, plus have low latency when browsing the
  web and teleconferencing, and not screw up their ISP when
  they’re doing bulk data transfers. 

That still doesn't address the problem when you have many users behind the same queue, some of whom care only about throughput and not latency. You need a scheme which will work when all of those users are acting selfishly.

I'm surprised he doesn't mention CurveCP. He's taken ideas from that author before (e.g. netstrings, which you'll find in the .torrent file format).

TCP does suck. If you try to use it for lots of short lived connections. And that pretty much sums up how it's being used nowadays, most the time.

For single, long term connections, TCP is fine.

Is the shout-out the mere mentioning of bittorrent? Or does nick weaver elude to bram some other way in the full article?

Designing networking protocols that are robust in mathematical sense is unbelievably difficult. In fact, we humans have only found optimal solutions in a few cases if you dig through the mathematics literature. Many real-world networking protocol design scenarios do not have a known non-pathological implementation. Furthermore, there is a large number of decentralized protocol designs that we can prove to have many poor qualities. To bludgeon the equine, people that can significantly advance our understanding of such things tend to win Nobel prizes and similar. It is that difficult.

That said, TCP is not the best we can design given everything we know about designing network protocols. It was good enough for the people that designed it at the time, and possibly (my chronology is fuzzy) was approximately as good as the mathematics would have reasonably allowed when it was developed. We can make it work well enough in many cases -- the economics of inertia. Other narrow use cases are better solved differently but are not general solutions.

It is one of those problems that sounds like it should be easy to solve on the surface but turns into a bloody epic challenge once you start to dig into it. I am not offering a solution, just noting that very few people can.

Who do you think made the development he's referring to happen?