The (M, W)-controller, originally studied by Afek, Awerbuch, Plotkin, and Saks, is a basic distributed tool that an abstraction for managing the consumption of a global resource in a distributed dynamic network. We establish new bounds on the message complexity of this tool based on a surprising connection between the controller problem and the monotonic labeling problem. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.4 [ComputerCommunication Networks]: Distributed Systems— distributed applications General Terms: Algorithms