Which company developed the QUIC transport protocol?

Google developed the QUIC transport protocol. The project began inside Google around 2012, with Jim Roskind among its principal designers, and was first implemented experimentally in Chrome. Google announced the technology publicly in 2013 as a faster alternative for web connections.

The original Google version, commonly called gQUIC, used UDP rather than TCP and combined transport features with encryption and stream multiplexing. Its goal was to reduce connection setup time and avoid the head-of-line blocking that can delay every HTTP/2 stream when one TCP packet is lost.

Google later brought QUIC to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization. IETF QUIC differs substantially from the earlier Google implementation and uses TLS 1.3 for its cryptographic handshake. The standardized protocol became RFC 9000 in May 2021 and provides the transport foundation for HTTP/3. The name is often expanded as “Quick UDP Internet Connections,” although the IETF treats QUIC as a name rather than an acronym.