The tone of surprise (in the paper as well as this thread) might have something to do with how the whole HTTP/2 stack has been sold as an unmitigated "good" for all and sundry. The paper also mentions how the SPDY whitepaper http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper presents exactly the opposite results in presence of packet-loss. The language in the paper falls short of an outright accusation but there's an implication that the promises of the new protocols have been oversold by the backers (mostly Google).