[ih] Why did DCCP fail to gain traction?

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 04-Oct-26 05:46, Thomas Fossati via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

That's certainly true, but I think that in reality there was no operational
problem that "congestion-controlled unreliable datagrams" would solve more
cheaply than simply buying extra bandwidth.

I see that Linux proactively removed DCCP support from Linux 6.16.

    Brian

> Then came QUIC, which made it completely redundant.
> 
> That's my rough understanding of the situation.
> 
> cheers!
> 
>>
>> John
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