– Typically, NACK-based congestion control is dismissed as being not viable due to the common notion that “open-loop” congestion control is simply “difficult.” Emerging real-time streaming applications, however, often rely on rate-based flow control and would benefit greatly from scalable NACK-based congestion control. This paper sheds new light on the performance of NACK-based congestion control and measures the amount of “difficulty” inherently present in such protocols. We specifically focus on increase-decrease (I-D) congestion control methods for real-time, rate-based streaming. First, we introduce and study several new performance measures that can be used to analyze the class of general I-D congestion control methods. These measures include monotonicity of convergence to fairness and packet-loss scalability (explained later in the paper). Second, under the assumptions that the only feedback from the network is packet loss, we show that AIMD is the only TCP-friendly...