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It's one of many network protocol improvements that could never be used effectively due to middle boxes. QUIC is specifically designed to prevent ossification like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification#Examples



This kind of ossification can be reduced by pressure campaigns.

Apple is very good at these. Mobile carriers were forced into configuring IPv6 and allowing MPTCP because Apple included that as part of certification to sell iPhones. Convince Apple that TCP Fast Open is important, and they'll make it work on mobile carriers through their considerable pressure. Home networks, not so much, so you've always got to have heuristics and detection; which again, Apple is very good at; they've had effective and rapid fallback for bad path MTU on iPhones for a lot longer than Androids, even though the Android kernel had options for it since the beginning --- they were only enabled recently. I'm very much not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era, but they do client side networking very well.

Google probably can't exert this kind of pressure directly, they don't have the carrier sales volume, IMHO. Maybe Samsung could. Nokia could have before the fall. Google could put it into a PageSpeed type tool though; they've got influence through that kind of tooling. And they control the two ends of lots of traffic, so they could test through changes in ChromeOS and their servers.


> Google probably can't exert this kind of pressure directly, they don't have the carrier sales volume, IMHO.

Google can just push the responsibility to manufacturers with the Play Store certification. That's a huuuuuge leverage they have.

Sadly they don't use it for much else than pushing anti-root crap.




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