The relevant keyword fu is 'congestion collapse', and it seems I may be misremembering what you can read about in the opening of Van Jacobsen's paper on congest

The relevant keyword fu is 'congestion collapse', and it seems I may be misremembering what you can read about in the opening of Van Jacobsen's paper on congestion control ( http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf http://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf ) and some new algorithms that were introduced in the early-mid 90s, but perhaps someone with more clue knows what I was thinking of Finally it's not the first time Google did something foul like that in the protocols department. IIRC they deploy a modified TCP slow start which also doesn't play fair in the face of contention