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6.3. <del> The past success of the largely TCP-based Internet is evidence that the mechanisms TCP used to achieve equilibrium quickly, at a point where TCP senders do not interfere with other TCP senders for sustained periods of time (RFC5681), have been largely successful. The Internet has continued to work even when the specific TCP mechanisms used to reach equilibrium changed over time (RFC7414). Because TCP provides a common tool to avoid contention, even when significant TCP-based applications like FTP were largely replaced by other significant TCP-based applications like HTTP, the transport behavior remained safe for the Internet. Modern TCP implementations (I-D.ietf-tcpm-rfc793bis) continue to probe for available bandwidth, and "back off" when a network path is saturated, but may also work to avoid growing queues along network paths, which prevent TCP senders from detecting quickly when a network path becoming saturated.  Congestion control mechanisms such as COPA COPA18 and BBR I-D.cardwell-iccrg-bbr-congestion-control make these decisions based on measured path delays, assuming that if the measured path delay is increasing, the sender is injecting packets onto the network path faster than the network can forward them (or the receiver can accept them) so the sender should adjust its sending rate accordingly. Although common TCP behavior has changed significantly since the days of Jacobson-Karels and RFC2001, even adding new congestion controllers such as CUBIC RFC8312, the common practice of implementing TCP as part of an operating system kernel has acted to limit how quickly TCP behavior can change.  Even with the widespread use of automated operating system update installation on many end- user systems, streaming media providers could have a reasonable expectation that they could understand TCP transport protocol behaviors, and that those behaviors would remain relatively stable in the short term. 6.4. </del> The QUIC protocol, developed from a proprietary protocol into an IETF standards-track protocol RFC9000, turns many of the statements made <del> in udp-behavior and tcp-behavior on their heads. </del> <ins> in reliable-behavior and unreliable-behavior on their heads. </ins> Although QUIC provides an alternative to the TCP and UDP transport protocols, QUIC is itself encapsulated in UDP.  As noted elsewhere in

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text: Some of this follows later in sections 3.2.1 and Yet, the split between these three sections is unclear. Having a discussion about today's Internet path characteristics and the dynamics at one place could be more useful. The text could also better distinguish between what matters to endpoints and considerations relevant only for middleboxes (such as passive monitors). Section 3.3 Path Requirements The statement "to find the bandwidth requirements for a router on the delivery path" may assume that the bottleneck on the path will be routers. Yet, on a path the bottlenecks could also be a link layer device (e.g., an Ethernet Switch, a Wifi access point, etc.). RFC 6077 (specifically Section 3.1.3) also explains that issue. A better wording may be "to find the bandwidth requirements for a delivery path". Section 3.6. Unpredictable Usage Profiles / Section 3.7. Extremely Unpredictable Usage Profiles I am not fully convinced by the distinction between "unpredictable" and "extremely unpredictable". To me, these two sections could be merged and maybe also be shortened. More specifically, Section 3.7 lists a lot of statistics from the past. What is IMHO a bit missing in Section 3.7 are actual operational considerations. For instance, are there any lessons learnt for the future? Note that Section 3.6 has a reasonable conclusion at the end. Section 4. Latency Considerations and Section 4.1. Ultra Low-Latency I am surprised by the definition "ultra low-latency (less than 1 second)", as well as some of the other numbers. For other real-time communication use cases, "ultra low-latency" would probably imply a latency requirement of the order of one millisecond. For instance, isochronous traffic for motion control in industrial networks may require a latency of 1 ms, and such "ultra-low latency" requirements are discussed elsewhere, e.g., in the DetNet WG. The terminology in this section should be better explained to readers dealing with networked systems with much harder latency requirements. And a reference should be added for these definitions in the context of video streaming.