I was there in the early BoF sessions for webtransport in Montreal / Singapore. We had dozens of people from all over the tech landscape chiming in and contributing.
The IETF is an open, participatory community. Claiming its run by Google is completely wrong, and honestly pretty demeaning to the work people put in to design specs.
If you want more independent voices at IETF, instead of inventing false claims to whinge about on HN, why don’t you be part of the solution and get involved? The mailing list for Webtransport is just a Google search away. Here it is now.[2]
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-webtrans-http3/
(I was one of the original authors in the W3C but left shortly after the BoF happened).
Also, HTTP 3 is standardized - isn't it weird that we can't actually use it from a browser?
According to https://caniuse.com/http3, HTTP/3 is live now in both Chrome and Firefox, and is available behind "Experimental Features" in Safari.
QUIC went through the IETF and HTTP/3 is supported in all modern browsers now.
It also has a lot of technical advantages over previous versions. Google doesn't always do the right thing but I haven't heard a solid argument over why their contributions to QUIC and HTTP/3 are bad.
As for webtransport, this is the first time I'm hearing of it. My browsers definitely don't support it.
...er, why? It keeps packet loss from slowing down site loading (as much as is possible). I'm not sure how this is "bad for human persons".
People tend to draw the line exactly at their current level of understanding. A few years ago, people would say "SSL is only for corporations", but with Let's Encrypt, you don't see that come up anymore. They're comfortable not having keys on their keyboard that can do the TLS handshake, because they now understand the server-side and client-side tooling, and the obscurity of a binary protocol they can't type out is no longer an impediment to productivity. Soon, they'll be comfortable with HTTP/3 as well.
For companies and institutions this requirement makes perfect sense. It's a great protocol for doing business. But for human people it introduces yet another layer of centralizing complexity for legal and social pressures to be applied and abuses to be enforced. It also makes setting up a webserver even more complex forcing more centralization in hosting. And not that anyone cares, but you can't legally use QUIC over amateur radio like you can HTTP or even HTTPS with a null cypher self signed cert.
Human persons need strong encryption much more than legal persons. Legal persons can't die/have their health damaged/be thrown in prison/be lynched by a mob. This is a way to make it available to everyone.
It's not hard to setup your CA and add a profile with it if you just want to communicate with other human persons and it must be HTTP 3. Of course browsers don't include random humans' CAs... I am happy about that.
And why don't you just use HTTP 1/2 over amateur radio? That your 0.0000001% usecase (don't tell me you yourself do it more often) isn't supported doesn't mean the whole thing is bad.