Comments on the Usefulness of Simple Best-Effort Traffic

This document presents some observations on "simple best-effort" traffic, defined loosely for the purposes of this document as Internet traffic that is not covered by Quality of Service mechanisms, congestion-based pricing, cost-based fairness, admissions control, or the like. One observation is that simple best-effort traffic serves a useful role in the Internet, and is worth keeping. While differential treatment of traffic can clearly be useful, we believe such mechanisms are useful as **adjuncts** to simple best- effort traffic, not as **replacements** of simple best-effort traffic. A second observation is that for simple best-effort traffic, some form of rough flow rate fairness is a useful goal for resource allocation, where "flow rate fairness" is defined by the goal of equal flow rates for different flows over the same path.