> Face it, protocols at this layer have ossified so that TCP and UDP are your only options if you want broad compatibility—and that’s nothing to do with any one party, it’s everyone’s fault. TCP and UDP will never get another sibling.
> Nope, this is absolutely false; I even have a concrete counterexample: IPv6. Standardised in 1995–1998, supported by DNS since 2008, supported by all major OSes by 2011, but still unavailable to a very large fraction of internet users.
> You’re seriously overestimating the ability to get people to change.
I think it's just the opposite: everyone else in the world is just giving up.
Actually changing these things is not some insurmountable, inscruitable task. It's just a protocol! It's ones and zeroes! It's not rocket science, or nuclear fission (which now seems possible?). It's a crappy little specification for a communications protocol. All we have to do is do the work. It's not easy, and it's not fast, but it's also not some unknown, unseen force in the universe that we can't comprehend. It's a damn network protocol (and a simple one at that).
We know how to change it, and we know that the only thing stopping us is the will to do it and cooperation. Giving up on this change is defeatism and laziness. Can you imagine if in any other category of science or technology, researchers refused to make progress because "it's too hard to work with other people" ?
How do you propose to convince literally millions of businesses to spend at least tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to change something deep in the technical stack that they don't understand, to achieve some nebulous slight improvement, when what they have at present works perfectly? And unless you can convince almost all of them to do it at about the same time, the old will necessarily linger (see also the compatible/incompatible problem I mentioned) and provide further disincentive. And then there are regulations that make any changes like this take an absolute minimum of five or ten years, because of multiple iterations of required regulation changes and certifications (e.g. the regulator must be convinced to allow thing Q, then manufacturer A must make and get certified product X, then manufacturer B that builds on that can make and get certified product Y, then C for Z, and finally the product you need is on the market and now you have to convince your boss you actually need to buy it).
You must have a strong lever if you wish to effect meaningful change. HTTPS adoption is a good example: browsers were in a position to honestly bully people into preferring it; and even then, it has been taking quite some years to get any substantial majority. I see no possible route whereby HTTP/3 could have succeed had QUIC been built upon IP rather than UDP.
Progress fails to happen due to inertia all the time. This is not something specific to software or hardware. The first example that springs to mind is climate change mitigation. Simply as a general observation about life, most people don't want to change what they're doing.
> Nope, this is absolutely false; I even have a concrete counterexample: IPv6. Standardised in 1995–1998, supported by DNS since 2008, supported by all major OSes by 2011, but still unavailable to a very large fraction of internet users.
> You’re seriously overestimating the ability to get people to change.
I think it's just the opposite: everyone else in the world is just giving up.
Actually changing these things is not some insurmountable, inscruitable task. It's just a protocol! It's ones and zeroes! It's not rocket science, or nuclear fission (which now seems possible?). It's a crappy little specification for a communications protocol. All we have to do is do the work. It's not easy, and it's not fast, but it's also not some unknown, unseen force in the universe that we can't comprehend. It's a damn network protocol (and a simple one at that).
We know how to change it, and we know that the only thing stopping us is the will to do it and cooperation. Giving up on this change is defeatism and laziness. Can you imagine if in any other category of science or technology, researchers refused to make progress because "it's too hard to work with other people" ?