Oct 6, 2025

Networking Rant 2 - Play Fair

While the Internel is not truly "neutral" since one generally pays for better performance, fairness still lives: people should get what they paid for. This has been the case for a long time with the elegant TCP congestion control mechanisms and fair queueing disciplines deployed everywhere, but this has been challenged 2 years ago.

Hysteria (again) uses a custom congestion control mechanism called Brutal which, as its name suggests, is brutal to other users sharing the same network resources with you. It does not help relieve network congestion by yielding the bandwith to others like Cubic or BBR, but even send more packets to overwhelm the middleboxes with their own traffic and try to compensate for their packet loss. It encourages everyone in that network to do the same because it hurts not to do so.

The developer of Hysteria and Brutal released a response saying it did more good than harm and only affects "a small percentage" of the Internet. I disagree. Among that small percentage of people who are affected by the censorship of Internet, we still have to play fair. Does everyone using the same VPN provider not affected by anyone using Brutal on their shared network? If everyone should be using Brutal, they are excluding people's right not to use it. And in their disclaimer (which is only in Chinese while other documentation pages are bilingual) -- they blame ISPs for not expanding their network bandwidth. But ISPs are expecting your fair usage to make everyone happy too. And a lot of things are uncontrollable -- DDoS or undersea internet fibres cut, for example.

What matters most is the fact it does not hurt one hair the authority who limits human rights to freely access the Internet, but people who are trying to escape it, and the ones that provides their services. It did not help to further jeopardize the already dystopian Internet environment of China or Iran. It just feels like not only victim blaming, but victim hurting to me. But I believe that techniques and technologies themselves are not accountable for human being's unresponsible behaviour. Hysteria do allow turning off Brutal completely and use BBR instead, but it's up to the people whether to do that or not.