> "where the biggest bandwidth hogs get the good service and everything else gets garbage." I think the worst-case, steady-state, scenario is actually equal ti

> "where the biggest bandwidth hogs get the good service and everything else gets garbage." I think the worst-case, steady-state, scenario is actually equal time sharing, and the whole value is that while you aren't talking, other packets flow faster. That's not a doomsday scenario. Noone is out anything. (If this equal-sharing isn't fast enough, your upstream links/peers are over-subscribed.) Also, your cache/memory analogy disrgards the possibility of simplifying and/or distributing the routing tables. Route consolidation is one solution. Having no table at all is ideal. My little underpowered home router has 1 entry for it's upstream gateway. There's no reason to keep billions of records in a table in any central router either, given there are only going to be so many uplinks. The more scalable solution is to distribute the table(s) in parallel to other peers. If the routing tables really are too big and can't be consolidated in core routers, the answer is simply more routers, geographically distributed to best meet demand, not fatter ones in the core, with higher latency, higher costs, and all the downsides of centralization like survaillance. QoS is a solution in search of a problem; networks scale fine when we scale them out, not up.