Trying to force everything over HTTP is a bad practice that is slowly killing the Internet.

[citation needed]. Traffic, usage, diversity of usage, investment, all of these are higher than they've ever been and still trending upwards. What definitions are we using by which we can look at these numbers and claim the internet is being "killed?"

If that's the definition by which people think the internet is dying, I find the definition suspect. And I find the solution suspect, because the notion of building protocols instead of platforms doesn't address the question of how to route those protocols over a network that has evolved to address the problems associated with laissez-faire protocol management in the past.

There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80. Does the idea of protocols instead of platforms address that reason? Because most people don't want to make themselves vulnerable to attacks along threat vectors they aren't even aware exist.

> There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80.

Elaborate? Rather than using different ports for different protocols and filtering what you don't want/need, you instead tunnel everything through port 80 and effectively don't filter at all?

Remember when Windows installs didn't have firewalls on by default and it was pretty trivial to attack people's installations via insufficiently-secure protocols running on open ports? It was a bad time.

HTTP has both elaborate tooling for deep packet analysis and a battle-hardened secured protocol, which we don't get with new protocols.

Well, yes, we used to not care about security as much.

These days, don't you think that consumer routers sold without firewalls should be about as illegal as selling cars with only motor braking ?

What? How is SSL dependent in any way on HTTPS?

Ftp and sftp are different protocols. So are HTTP and HTTPS. So are IMAP and IMAPS. And that's the issue with new protocols being added: the security question is a protocol-layer question, but one can't just hot-drop a new protocol into SSL and call it a day; security requires abstraction-breaking considerations.