When a product provides useful services, the Internet and related technologies will adapt and expand to handle the load and overcome minor technical problems. Excuse me, John, but I stand by my original comments. My previous post calls out only one such behavior. By supporting multiple connections to retrieve a single web page, Netscape originated a policy which places the heaviest resource burden on the intervening network itself, not on the server or the client. This hasn't changed in a year and a half and if anything, it has increased dramatically.
Browsers now can retrieve audio, video, animation, graphics and text, all at the same time.
To fully understand the adverse ramifications of this, I think you need to understand the ISP market and how their businesses are structured. Assume for a moment that you are a small Internet access provider and you support, say 1000 users at any one time on a single T1 circuit. You can now support only 100 RTSS users on a pipe that used to support 1000 non-RTSS users. To have a viable business, you need to purchase 10times the infrastructure you once had to support your current userbase. If you're a small service provider, you can no longer compete with the larger players.