I’ve been writing lately about the nuts and bolts of network discrimination. Today I want to continue that discussion by talking about how the Internet responds to congestion, and how network discrimination might affect that response. As usual, I’ll simplify the story a bit to spare you a lengthy dissertation on network management, but I won’t mislead you about the fundamental issues.

The implications for network discrimination should now be pretty clear. If the network discriminates by sending misleading signals about congestion, and sending them preferentially to certain machines or certain applications, the incentive for those machines and applications to stick to the social contract and do their share to control congestion, will weaken.

Will this lead to a wave of defections that destroys the Net? Probably not, but I can't be sure. I do think this is something we should think about.