We present and validate TICP, a TCP-friendly reliable transport protocol to collect information from a large number of receivers spread over the Internet. TICP is a stand-alone protocol that can be used by any application requiring the collection of information: quality of reception in a multicast session, numbering of population, weather monitoring, etc. The protocol does not impose any constraint on the nature of the collected information. It ensures two main things: (i) the information to collect arrives entirely and correctly at the source where it is stored to be treated later, and (ii) the implosion at the source and the congestion of the network are avoided by controlling the rate at which receivers send their information. The congestion control part of TICP is designed with the main objective to be friendly with applications using TCP. We implement TICP in ns-2, and we validate that it allows to quickly and reliably collect information from receivers, while avoiding network congestion and being fair with competing traffic.