Inspired by a few posts I've seen recently that complain about everything having become IP, and then TCP, and then HTTP, and there being nothing left in the rest of the space...

Another way to look at this, is as an organic, emergent, permissionless process of people figuring out exactly where the boundary is between "application-specific requirements" and "generalizable requirements" in a network protocol.

And so far, it seems people have largely settled on "a way to transmit discrete arbitrarily-sized messages with an ordering guarantee, built-in support for meta-headers, and serialization of arbitrary labelled data consisting of keys, primitive values, lists, and maps".

Or in other words, HTTP+JSON.

And sure, one way to look at it is "we're neglecting all these other protocol features". But I think it's more constructive to draw insights from this about what people *actually need*, completing that model from the complaints about things people find lacking in HTTP+JSON, and iterating from there in future protocol development.