--- title: RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020) | daily.dev description: RFC 8890, published by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), argues that the IETF should explicitly prioritize end users over other stakeholders when making... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/rfc-8890-the-internet-is-for-end-users-2020--qswg1dqac twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020) | daily.dev og:description: RFC 8890, published by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), argues that the IETF should explicitly prioritize end users over other stakeholders when making... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/rfc-8890-the-internet-is-for-end-users-2020--qswg1dqac og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/qSwG1dQAC.png og:image:alt: RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 15 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary RFC 8890, published by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), argues that the IETF should explicitly prioritize end users over other stakeholders when making protocol design decisions. The author, who wrote the RFC, explains why IETF decisions are inherently political despite being framed as purely technical, using examples like DNS-over-HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello. The piece calls for IETF participants to acknowledge the real-world consequences of their decisions, engage in broader consultation with policymakers and civil society, and apply principled reasoning grounded in end-user benefit rather than hiding behind technical neutrality. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 46 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-30). **TL;DR:** Commenters are broadly critical of the current state of the internet — particularly Cloudflare's captchas and centralization, DoH eroding user control, and AI bots making the web hostile to humans. There's a fatalistic but occasionally creative undercurrent about what, if anything, can be done. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 40% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - Some commenters note that DoH provides meaningful security benefits in censored or infrastructure-poor regions where DNS is tampered with. - A few suggest decentralized or p2p alternatives (e.g., BitTorrent-style archives, federated 'mycelial' webs) as potential escape hatches. **The pushback** - Cloudflare captchas are seen as so burdensome that users and LLMs alike bypass them, making them ineffective against bots while harassing humans. - Cloudflare's centralization is criticized for making the internet worse by collapsing diverse traffic into indistinguishable destination IPs, removing user-level control. - DoH is seen as stripping home users of the ability to monitor and block unwanted device connections, including ads. - The RFC's idealistic framing of 'the internet is for end users' is viewed as toothless since the IETF has no enforcement power over ISPs or tech companies. - The web is increasingly described as an 'intranet' — walled off, subscription-gated, and hostile to open access. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters are largely cynical about the internet's trajectory, focusing on Cloudflare's harms, the bot/human arms race, and the gap between IETF ideals and corporate reality. **Hottest debate:** Whether DoH is a net positive (security for censored users) or net negative (removes home-user control over their own network) generated the sharpest back-and-forth. **Open questions** - If Cloudflare blocks Googlebot and AI crawlers bypass captchas anyway, what is the actual security benefit of the current captcha regime? - What realistic alternative to Cloudflare could provide DDoS protection without centralizing and opaquing internet traffic? - How can the IETF's 'end user' principle be operationalized when adoption depends entirely on ISPs and large tech companies? **Highlights** > Inevitably the internet will have two types of users: 1. The anti-bot bots that must stop you from proceeding, because they aren't entirely sure you aren't a bot and 2. The bots that can get past them, which we all must eventually deploy, if we want a chance to visit a web page > — [dlcarrier on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110259) > With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain. > — [tempodox on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112580) > Who's an end user. Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses. Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts. Throw in internet-centralisation through HN darlings like cloudflare and you're screwed. You have no idea what anything is talking to, as it's the same destination IPs, so the choice is either block it completely, or allow it with no control. > — [iso1631 on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109707) > Every technology has both pros and cons. Those who develop standards must weigh both sides rather than considering only one of them. In countries where the internet is subject to censorship, as well as in regions with underdeveloped infrastructure, DNS queries are highly likely to be deliberately tampered with, poisoned, or hijacked. DoH is a very practical way to mitigate this problem, and I do not believe that the ability to block advertisements is more important than that. Moreover, advanced users can still run their own DNS services for ad blocking, and, at least for the foreseeable future, DoH will not prevent them from continuing to use traditional DNS. You cannot criticize an important improvement in security merely because it makes ad blocking less convenient. Other people may face threat models that are a hundred times more serious than yours. > — [Sha1rholder on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113658) > I think fighting for a purpose-based ideology of the internet is actually doomed to fail because the form of the technology will dictate how its used and regulation and efforts will only slightly affect that. E.g. If the internet is super-fast and has the capability to deliver video ads, it will be used for that. If everyone just had a connection with the speed of a 56K modem, that video-based ad model wouldn't work. If we really want the internet to be a certain way, we have to change the underlying technology used, not the ideology behind it. Because if an technology has a capability, it will be used to do whatever is most successful in the capitalistic system, not what's best for 'end users'. Regulation sometimes be effective, but...the model of regulation in a world of freely-evolving technology is a broken system most of the time. > — [vouaobrasil on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113657) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109474) · 34 points · 46 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [What Are RFCs? 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