… you’d have to negotiate much of the hard stuff that TCP accomplishes (e.g. flow control), for each different party you wanted to interact with.

When building an Internet scale machine-to-machine stack, your objective is to embue it with sufficient information to enable ad-hoc integration between parties which implement it. Agreeing on only a “messaging layer” while not agreeing on an interface, prevents two parties from integrating in an ad-hoc manner, just as agreeing on IP alone (or IP plus part of the TCP spec) is insufficient to permit an ad-hoc TCP connection to be established.

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