Changing the Internet was: Encouraging a healthy HTTP/2 ecosystem

On 02.07.2014 21:19, William Chan (ι™ˆζ™Ίζ˜Œ) wrote:
>
> Great. I think we're making progress here on the core discussion. Yes, 
> I think we agree that the current state of things is that many ports 
> are unusable due to filtering proxies and the like. Therefore, more 
> and more protocols are getting tunneled over port 80 and port 443, and 
> they're moving up the stack. We're doing multiplexing in the 
> application layer since we've been unable to deploy multiplexing at a 
> lower layer. It sounds to me like you think that the inability to 
> deploy new TCP options is somewhat unfortunate, but it's the best 
> reality we can hope for because "There are never any easy technical 
> fixes for hard political problems."
Multiplexing is a good idea but doesn't solve all problems. For example 
WTP (part of the WAP protocol stack) had multiplexing but was dropped in 
favor of HTTP/1.1.
>
> My assertion is that this situation is unacceptable. You're right, for 
> political / compliance reasons, proxies are going to be there and do 
> these things that ossify our protocols and force us to tunnel higher 
> up the stack and develop way more cruft in our protocol stack. I do 
> think that we should fight this. If MITM proxies outright drop ALPN 
> from the negotiation, thereby disabling HTTP/2, then so be it. I think 
> it's better to let those networks fall behind the rest of the internet 
> than force the vast majority of the internet into the
Dropping ALPN could be difficult, so the result may be that the network 
gets disconnected or the MITM proxy will do HTTP/2. If we loose to many 
networks then HTTP/2 will go nowhere. What to do if something like this 
is build into most home routers to protect the kids?
> lowest common denominator. I'd rather pick this battleground here and 
> now, rather than continuing to tunnel more complexity higher up the 
> stack every time we want to deploy new changes without having to 
> update all intermediaries on the internet.
The internet nodes need to support your changes. If you change how 
things are routed, for example by saying the only allowed intermediaries 
are the ones that are controlled by you so you can update them, then 
this becomes a different network and is probably no longer the Internet.

Regards,
Roland

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2014 23:25:38 UTC