Because they didn't do that with TLS and HTTP, and then they discovered many networks had become home to middleboxes that shipped ossified out of the box and br

Because they didn't do that with TLS and HTTP, and then they discovered many networks had become home to middleboxes that shipped ossified out of the box and broke horribly whenever trying to deploy any improvements They're like mold, these middleboxes. Grows easily, doesn't evolve much, likes sitting in the dark, surprisingly hard to kill, and ultimately not very friendly to human life By exercising the fields early and encrypting anything that's not nailed down, they prevent ossification from taking hold before it becomes a problem