[ih] Why did DCCP fail to gain traction?

[Thomas Fossati]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2026 at 6:26 PM John Kristoff via Internet-history
<internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
> DCCP (IETF RFC 4330) is/was a relatively new transport in Internet
> history. I don't think it ever really saw much, if any, deployment or
> support in applications. It was removed from the Linux kernel last year.
>
> Was it too late, too complex, too little, or just deemed unnecessary
> given available alternatives such as QUIC?  I don't recall seeing
> much discussion about why it failed to gain traction and I'm interested
> to hear what the collective wisdom of this group might have to say about
> that.

It failed because of an abundance of middleboxes and a lack of APIs.
Unlike SCTP (which is similarly affected by middleboxes), it never
found a niche where it could be safely deployed.
Then came QUIC, which made it completely redundant.

That's my rough understanding of the situation.

cheers!

>
> John
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> -
> Unsubscribe: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/9b6ef0621638436ab0a9b23cb0668b0b?The%20list%20to%20be%20unsubscribed%20from=Internet-history



-- 
Thomas