[lechuga]

I'm intimately familiar with cases where you actually would prefer to use UDP. My point is most of the time these cases aren't what you're dealing with.

In addition to reliability, TCP provides congestion control which provides approximate fairness of bandwidth utilization per connection. Fairness here meaning given a limited pipe of size W each connection gets a W/N slice of the pipe's available bandwidth. I don't know that I'd like to live on an internet where every hipster made their own decision about how to handle congestion control, see also congestive collapse.

[KaiserPro]

>every hipster made their own decision about how to handle congestion control

Unless they had access to a tier 1/2 network provider it'd be mostly harmless I suspect. They'd spam their local gateway. "Look I can send 300k packets a second over standard DSL"

But yes, TCP is generally a good thing.

[dtech]

> My point is most of the time these cases aren't what you're dealing with

Which is why the "default" protocol for most things is still TCP.