[kazinator]

If many people are driving aggressively and cutting in, everyone is made late; but those who engage in the behavior arrive earlier than those who refrain.

A router that is dropping packets due to being congested is still forwarding some packets. If you wallop that router with your own packets, that's your best chance of getting more of your packets to be forwarded, at the expense of someone else's being dropped. (Assuming the router has no countermeasure against that behavior.)

If we take a simple leaky bucket model: the router drops the packet because it has no resources in that moment. A moment later, space opens up because of transmitted/cleared data, so when a packet is received in that later moment, is not dropped. There is likely a chain of leaky buckets: multiple points in the router traversal where packets can be dropped due to resource issues: dropping could be on the receive side or transmit. Wherever there is a queue whose length is capped or a memory allocation operation.

If you wallop that machine with your packets, you increase the chances that when those moments come when resources are available that allow a packet to be retained rather than leaked onto the floor, that opportunity goes to one of your packets rather than someone else's.

[the8472]

That's only true if the router drops randomly rather than hashing into buckets by host