Transport-level protocols in user space

Whatever "real-world" agency is actually policing the internet has much bigger fish to fry than congestion control. Among many others, ransomware looks higher priority to me. Good luck with that one already.

I don't think anyone expects the internet to look anything like a civilization any time soon. I hope the Linux network stack maintainers are not under such an illusion.

> I'm not sure that's really true, so much in society depends on people doing the right thing even when an authority isn't watching, civilization seems to still exist. The network is just another facet of human interaction.

The problem here is that the people feeling the pain are not the people inflicting it. Even within a household. And as soon as the choke-point moves "out there", all the evidence says that people are indifferent (at best!) to the pain they inflict on other people - if it's some impersonal "them", it's not seen as important.

I think the fairest thing to do is choke traffic by IP address. And if it's IPv6, you choke based on the network portion (iiuc, v6 comes as a network half and device half, and it's allocated by the network half). That way, cheating by opening multiple connections won't work :-)

Cheers,
Wol