Well, it may stifle innovation in the protocol, while encouraging innovation in the implementation and/or use. In my book, that's a net win.
Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire, by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we could ever get by a "better TCP".
TCP dates from 1974, QUIC from 2012. I don't think a new transport protocol after 38 years invalidates my point - that there is less room (not none) for innovation in the protocol than there is for innovation in the things that use the protocol.
TCP is a bad example because it has become so hard to replace.
SCTP failed to replace TCP for various reasons, such as too many middleboxes filtering ULPs that aren't TCP or UDP, or SCTP being far to rich and complex, or just inertia.
But TCP has had a ton of problems, and while there has been a ton of research into those problems and the solution spaces for them, adopting even hacky solutions into TCP has been difficult. As a result, TCP has gotten complex and bloated over the years without at the same time solving all the problems that a new protocol could solve.
On the plus side, in spite of inhibiting innovation at the transport layer, TCP enabled innovation at the application layer by making the application layer possible at all.
didn't say it invalidated your point just that it was a bad example. just because something has inertia doesn't mean its good or even okay. it just means it timed the market correctly.
you could have used UDP for example which being as old as TCP has spawned many new protocols on top of it (including quic) and in its own right has been the backbone of many applications.
Why? There's less room for innovation in the protocol. Take TCP, for instance. Could it be improved? Probably. But how much gain are you going to get by innovating there? On the other hand, how much was enabled, on both ends of the wire, by everything standardizing on TCP? Far, far more than we could ever get by a "better TCP".