Google can push that because there's a huge user base with Chrome and you don't want your shiny ecommerce site to be marked as not safe by Chrome, do you?

On the other hand, the packets moved through the wires to send this comment to HN and the ones moved to send this comment to your computer are easily managed by dozens of different people and a handful of different companies with different agendas, budgets, needs and even skills. Cisco definitely manufactured and sold most of the devices out there, but they surely don't manage them or decide when they're upgraded. It gets worse, because actually there's not only Cisco out there.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but just look at the slow IPv6 adoption, despite the efforts of all the big players (Google, Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Linux, ... !) supporting it in a timely manner, it's still not there.

Also remember that everything Google has ever pushed through has been above UDP/TCP, because it's far easier to push through changes on top of that than not. There's a reason why QUIC is being developed on top of UDP instead of as a transport layer in its own right.

> Maybe instead of the "good luck" attitude we should start pushing an "upgrade or suffer" attitude.

"Upgrade or suffer" rarely works in practice. Rendering (or rather the lack of rendering) malformed XHTML is a great example of this