Process

The initial QUIC protocol was designed by Jim Roskind at Google and was initially implemented in 2012, announced publicly to the world in 2013 when Google's experimentation broadened.

Back then, QUIC was still claimed to be an acronym for "Quick UDP Internet Connections", but that has been dropped since then.

Google implemented the protocol and subsequently deployed it both in their widely used browser (Chrome) and in their widely used server-side services (Google search, gmail, youtube and more). They iterated protocol versions fairly quickly and over time they proved the concept to work reliably for a vast portion of users.

In June 2015, the first internet draft for QUIC was sent to the IETF for standardization, but it took until late 2016 for a QUIC working group to get approved and started. But then it took off immediately with a high degree of interest from many parties.

In 2017, numbers quoted by QUIC engineers at Google mentioned that around 7% of all Internet traffic were already using this protocol. The Google version of the protocol.