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You might be able to credibly defend it, but it's still depressingly silly that we're cut off from a large swath of our extensible-by-design protocol stack.

These days, people justify HTTP for everything with the argument that opening up a TCP socket is not guaranteed to work as reliably as HTTP-over-TCP.

They might be right, but god that sucks.

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I see arguments like this as a form of the naturalist fallacy. Not every aspect of the original TCP/IP design is worth preserving and exploiting. We don't need an URG pointer. We don't need IP source routing (really, we don't need the IP options we have now). We don't need a "length" field in UDP. &c.

TCP should have been built on top of UDP, as should ICMP. The IP "protocol" field doesn't do us much good. I don't think we should fret too much about not exploiting it.

For the record, IP source routing has its use cases. It's done via firewall or high-end router policy, and it's not a federated protocol. but it's handy.

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