> It would be very good for the net if something came up that penalised middleboxes though.
What you can do is to have a good protocol that requires no interference from middleboxes but detects it if it happens, and then a less efficient legacy fallback protocol that basically looks as much as possible like HTTPS.
Then if you detect interference from a middlebox, show the user a message that says, "WARNING: MAN IN THE MIDDLE ATTACK DETECTED. Something is modifying connections on this network. This may compromise security and performance."
Then hopefully having multiple different apps show a message like that to every user on the network will get enough users complaining to fix the middlebox so that it stops breaking new things.
What you can do is to have a good protocol that requires no interference from middleboxes but detects it if it happens, and then a less efficient legacy fallback protocol that basically looks as much as possible like HTTPS.
Then if you detect interference from a middlebox, show the user a message that says, "WARNING: MAN IN THE MIDDLE ATTACK DETECTED. Something is modifying connections on this network. This may compromise security and performance."
Then hopefully having multiple different apps show a message like that to every user on the network will get enough users complaining to fix the middlebox so that it stops breaking new things.