Also, imagine the joules saved worldwide if known key names didn't have to be sent each time, or, better yet, data was packed in a format that optimized for size and processing speed rather than readability.

I mean, I enjoy the idea of human readability as much as Jon Postel, but at certain scales you have to wonder about the hidden cost of petabytes of human-readable data flying over the wire, never to be seen by anything but computers.