The self-clocking principle (SCP) of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) had been analyzed for a network implementing a per-Flow buffering scheme. The ideal SCP is yet unknown for the Internet which implements a first-in-first-out buffering scheme. This paper derives an ideal SCP for the Internet by formulating the traffic transmission control as a typical control problem and then solving it by a control-theoretic approach. The ideal SCP reveals the defect of the SCP being deployed in the Internet that it is insufficient to avoid congestion by adjusting the packet effective window based on records of the outstanding packets of a single source; instead outstanding packets from other sources also have to be counted. The ideal SCP also reveals the difficulties of developing and implementing an effective self-clocking scheme for congestion control in the Internet. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.