The power of a company like Google can be great when harnessed appropriately. When Chrome was the new kid on the block, they had every incentive to be compatible, faster, better, more flexible, etc. Now that they are the leader, their incentives are very different. I'm very concerned about the rapid move away from straightforward text-based protocols to opaque binary protocols. Yes the performance is better, but the protocol itself is far less flexible, harder to troubleshoot, and harder to build on. The whole reason HTTP took off was because it was simple, human-readable, and easy to implement, and built on TCP which was well understood and simple. It was a liberating change from the rigid, corporate, non-standard binary protocols coming from the Microsofts and IBMs and Oracles of the world. There are plenty of ways HTTP/1.1 could have been improved for better performance without sacrificing its fundamental openness. But HTTP/2 and QUIC are taking us back into the realm of non-standard and more rigid and opaque binary protocols. Performance on poorly designed sites that load tens of megabytes of crap from hundreds of URLs on each page load is the hook Google is using to push us back into what I consider a dark age of network communication. But it doesn't have to be this way.