Lucian Armasu reports:
The HTTP/2 standard, the successor to HTTP/1.1, has recently been finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and now all browsers and servers are free to use it. The HTTP/2 protocol initially started as a Google project called SPDY, which was encrypted by default, and it later entered the standardization process at IETF, so all browsers can start using it.
Unfortunately, despite the protocol’s initial promise to be encrypted-only, the Open Web Alliance group, formed by companies such as Verizon, Comcast, Cisco, DISH, Microsoft and others, managed to fight against that plan in the last few months of the protocol’s standardization process, making encryption optional. (You can learn more about the Open Web Alliance in this InfoWorld article.)
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