Policing freedom to use the internet resource pool

Ideally, everyone should be free to use as much of the Internet resource pool as they can take. But, whenever too much load meets too little capacity, everyone's freedoms collide. We show that attempts to isolate users from each other have corrosive side-effects - discouraging mutually beneficial sharing of the resource pool and harming the Internet's evolvability. We describe an unusual form of traffic policing which only pushes back against those who use their freedom to limit the freedom of others. This offers a vision of how much better the Internet could be. But there are subtle aspects missing from the current Internet architecture that prevent this form of policing being deployed. This paper aims to shift the research agenda onto those issues, and away from earlier attempts to isolate users from each other.