It blows my mind that people are invested in this. HTTP is a 35+ year old text-based protocol. Its becoming the COBOL of digital transmission.
Just as one example, among many, you could try WebSockets (or some other similar protocol) and then push anything over it. Your message could be plain text, JSON, binary, whatever. Web Sockets and protobufs are bidirectional (full duplex) too.
The internet is complex, and you have tons of protocols that are not well supported. TCP/HTTP are well supported by proxies and have well-defined, stable specs, which also help with caching, throttling, etc.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it is worse than alternatives, most likely it is quite the contrary.
Its worse than alternatives because it imposes greater complexity on everybody that uses it. COBOL is also old. That also does not mean COBOL is bad, but nobody wants to write COBOL any more when there are so many better options available.
