we can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks
If that can be and is done, it's fine with me, but will it be done in time? My growth is already being hindered by people being unable to get through the net's core to sites they want to reach. They leave the net, disillusioned. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when the looming UDP-based-multi-media explosion is added to this.
Since I use programmable routers, I plan to reprogram them such that when an interface output queue is full or getting full, and it's time to do Van's trick of "pick a number from 1 to N+1 and destroy that packet", the chance of a UDP getting blasted will be higher than for a TCP. This is predicated on (1) TCP is mostly well behaved, except when it comes form a Netscape browser opening too many (more than one) simultaneous TCP connection to the same destination; (2) UDP apps I care about, like DNS, will do reasonable things like fallback and timeout and retry; and (3) it is OK to violate the layering if it makes your network stop melting. If you think this would be a useful feature, ask Cisco to make it part of SPD.