QUIC focuses on the maintenance and evolution of the encrypted transport protocol QUIC, supporting its implementation and developing possible extensions to it. Created initially by Google and growing in usage, QUIC is designed to combine cryptographic protections with transport protocols, folding security and transport into the same mechanism. Despite this robustness, the deployment model for QUIC is structured so that, in the case of failure, systems that prefer to use QUIC will revert to TLS-over-TCP. This means that a malicious network operator that objects to QUIC – and its ability to hide metadata – can simply block it, so clients will default to less secure protocols.