> only small UDP packets There's something to be said for that here, however. When was the last time you typed out a chat/IRC message longer than 512 bytes?

> only small UDP packets There's something to be said for that here, however. When was the last time you typed out a chat/IRC message longer than 512 bytes? That's the minimum MTU on the Internet; packets below that size can ignore fragmentation and the retransmission-amplification that comes with it. Here's a beautifully elegant chat protocol that uses only UDP: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3992 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=3992 It also uses only symmetric crypto, for "that's a feature not a bug" reasons; among them: it forces its users to forge decentralized WoTs instead of relying on big centralized platforms to authenticate their own friends to them. > A lot of the reason the IETF process ... led to so much cruft and weirdness is that there were telco folks That has been a major problem for a long time now.