The QUIC working group will provide standards-track specifications for a UDP-based, stream-multiplexing, encrypted transport protocol, based on pre-standardization implementation and deployment experience. Key goals for QUIC are: - Minimizing connection establishment and overall transport latency for applications, starting with HTTP; - Providing multiplexing without head-of-line blocking; - Requiring only changes to path endpoints to enable deployment; - Enabling multipath and forward error correction extensions; and - Providing always-secure transport, using TLS 1.3 by default. The work of the group will have five main focus areas, corresponding to five core deliverables. The first of these is the core transport work, which will describe the wire format, along with the mechanisms for connection establishment, stream multiplexing, data reliability, loss detection and recovery, congestion control, and options negotiation. Work on congestion control will describe use of a standardized congestion controller as a default scheme for QUIC. Defining new congestion control schemes is explicitly out of scope for this group. QUIC is expected to support rapid, distributed development and testing of features. The second of these focus areas is security. This work will describe how the protocol uses TLS 1.3 for key negotiation and will also describe how those keys are used to provide confidentiality and integrity protection of both application data and QUIC headers. This work will ensure that QUIC has security and privacy properties that are at least as good as a stack composed of TLS 1.3 using TCP (or MPTCP when using multipath). The third focus area describes the mapping between the HTTP application protocol and the transport facilities of QUIC. This mapping will have performance characteristics comparable with HTTP/2, and provide extension mechanisms similar to HTTP/2. Upon completion of this mapping, work to define additional mappings may be included by updates to this charter, or may be worked on by other working groups. The fourth focus area will be on extensions to core protocol facilities, to enable datagram delivery, version negotiation, and multipath capabilities. Other extensions are out of the scope of this charter. The fifth focus area will provide an Applicability and Manageability Statement, describing how, and under what circumstances, QUIC may be safely used, and describing deployment and manageability implications of the protocol. Additionally, the Working Group will provide guidance on how to handle QUIC traffic in load balancers. Current practices for network management of transport protocols include the ability to apply access control lists (ACLs), hashing of flows for equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP), directional signaling of flows, signaling of flow setup and teardown, and the ability to export information about flows for accounting purposes. The QUIC protocol need not be defined to enable each of these abilities, or enable them in the same way as they are enabled by TCP when used with TLS 1.3, but the working group must consider the impact of the protocol on network management practices, reflecting the tensions described in RFC 7258. Note that consensus is required both for changes to the current protocol mechanisms and retention of current mechanisms. In particular, because something is in the initial document set does not imply that there is consensus around the feature or around how it is specified. The QUIC working group will work closely with the HTTPbis working group, especially on the QUIC mapping for HTTP.