A veteran columnist argues the internet's 50-year-old rulebook keeps winning because it bends instead of breaking, just as AI data centers start testing a TCP alternative called Homa.
TCP/IP, the rulebook that lets every connected device talk to every other, traces back to a 1974 paper by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. In an October 12 column, veteran writer Rupert Goodwins argues it endures because it is open and practical: splitting it into IP for delivery and TCP for reliability means new ideas can run alongside it without breaking anything.
That flexibility is being tested by AI data centers, where engineers are pushing a new protocol called Homa into Linux. It tells the receiver how big each message is, so short messages can jump the queue.
For ordinary users, the likely effect is indirect: quicker, cheaper AI services.
Almost every message, video call and AI chatbot reply you sent today traveled on rules sketched out in a 1974 paper. That paper, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, became TCP/IP, and in a column published on October 12, veteran tech writer Rupert Goodwins argues it has outlasted almost everything else in computing by being stubbornly practical.
Why should you care about a networking protocol? Because the AI boom is the latest test of whether that old design can keep up. Data centers training and running large AI models move huge volumes of short messages between machines, and engineers are now trying a newcomer called Homa there. The interesting part is how Homa arrives: it doesn’t need to tear anything down, and that’s the whole reason TCP/IP endures.
TCP/IP is really two protocols stacked together. IP, the Internet Protocol, is the delivery service: it sends small packets of data from one address to another on a best-effort basis, with no promise about when they arrive, in what order, or whether they arrive at all.
TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol, sits on top. It turns those unreliable packets into a reliable, ordered stream, noticing what went missing and asking for it again. When a web page loads completely and in the right order, TCP is doing that work.
Goodwins calls the decision to split one protocol into these two parts one of its smartest moves. Because IP is simple and separate, anyone who dislikes how TCP behaves can build a different protocol that also speaks IP and run it side by side. Nothing else on the network has to change.
TCP/IP endures in the AI era because it has survived bigger threats before. In its early years, large incumbents pushed their own designs, including IBM’s Systems Network Architecture and the telecom industry’s Asynchronous Transfer Mode. Critics argued that packets with unpredictable delays could never carry anything reliable. Open, consensus-built TCP/IP simply kept working, and it won.
The big switch came on January 1, 1983, when ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, moved every connected computer from its old NCP protocol to TCP/IP in one coordinated cutover. Engineers call a change like that a flag day, because old and new systems can’t talk to each other, so everyone has to move at once.
Success brought its own crises. Once the web took off, skeptics warned that ordinary users and images would clog the network into collapse. Fixes to how TCP handles congestion, developed in the late 1980s, kept that at bay, and they were rolled out with no central authority in charge of the internet.
Then came the address shortage. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, enough for about 4.3 billion devices, which once looked generous and then wasn’t nearly enough. IPv6, with vastly larger 128-bit addresses, was the long-term answer, but you can’t hold a flag day for billions of gadgets. Instead, a router trick called Network Address Translation (NAT), described in 1994 as a short-term fix, let a whole household of devices share one public address. Goodwins admits it’s ugly. It’s also why your home network still runs on IPv4.
Homa is a transport protocol built for data centers, and its backers are now working to add it to the Linux kernel. A patch series started that process in September. The developers say it can cut the worst-case delays for short messages by ten to a hundred times compared with TCP, with the biggest gains when short and long messages compete on a busy network.
The difference is in how data is described. TCP sends a continuous stream of bytes, so the receiving machine doesn’t know how much is coming, and the sender decides how fast to push. Homa’s first packet announces the size of the whole message. That lets the receiver put short messages first and tell senders of big ones to wait their turn, a good fit for AI systems that fire many small requests between servers.
Homa is also connectionless and message-based, and it needs only about one socket per application instead of one for every machine it talks to. That saves a lot of memory in a data center where every server talks to thousands of others.
Not everyone is sold. Some network engineers see Homa as a solution looking for a problem. And it isn’t the first attempt to work around TCP’s limits: Google built QUIC to avoid TCP’s habit of holding up a whole stream when one packet goes missing, and QUIC is now the foundation of HTTP/3, which many big websites already use.
Nothing about your phone, laptop or Wi-Fi router changes because of Homa. It is designed for traffic inside data centers, between servers sitting a few feet apart, not for your connection to the outside world. Your devices will keep using TCP, plus QUIC for many websites, over IPv4 and IPv6.
Indirectly, though, it could matter. If AI providers squeeze delays out of their internal networks, chatbots and AI features could respond faster and cost less to run. And because Homa runs alongside TCP rather than replacing it, the risk of anything breaking for ordinary users is low. That is exactly the flexibility the column praises.
If you want to see this history in your own home, look at your router’s settings page. The private addresses your devices get, and the single public address they share, are NAT at work, the 1990s patch that is still holding the internet together.
TCP/IP has gathered plenty of odd extensions over the years. One of the best known is RFC 1149, an April Fools’ Day proposal from April 1, 1990, for sending IP packets by carrier pigeon. A Norwegian Linux group actually tried it, and one of those pigeon-carried packets was auctioned at Christie’s in 2026 for $20,480.
Goodwins ends with a light-hearted proposal: make January 1, the anniversary of ARPANET’s cutover, a worldwide celebration of TCP/IP and call it Flag Day. Given that the protocol is now carrying the AI boom on top of everything else, it’s hard to argue it hasn’t earned one.
No. Homa is designed to run alongside TCP in data centers, not to replace it, and the open internet still runs on TCP/IP.
Not directly. It targets traffic between servers inside data centers, though faster AI back ends could make some online services quicker.
Because NAT lets many devices share one public IPv4 address, so there was never a forced switch to IPv6 at the edge of the network.
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