On 19 Apr 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:
True, there is some buffering in the Internet. And it does make it much more resilant to short term peaks. But as any DDOS attack shows, if you use near peak capacity for even a short term, other traffic is rudely shoved aside. Further, traffic does not return to its original levels for a considerable period of time after each peak capacity event. If you set up conditions just right, not only will you not receive "peak" payment from from the customer gaming the system, you receive lower payments from all your "average" customers too.
Thats why statiscial queueing which penalizes unfriendly flows is a good thing. http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~wuchang/blue/ You could think of the unfriendly penalizing as an data version of a 'self-reseting fuse': disobey the rules (congestion control) and find yourself cut off.