Fetching a module from GitHub often requires cloning the repository, when all you needed was the contents of a specific version, or even just the go.mod to do v

Fetching a module from GitHub often requires cloning the repository, when all you needed was the contents of a specific version, or even just the go.mod to do version resolution. The proxy protocol provides the artifacts you need, for sometimes a 10x bandwidth saving. (Also, lots of security issues in "go get" came from using git to fetch untrusted repositories.)