Yes and no. TCP is a transport protocol that sits on top of IP. All of the specifications are public domain RFCs. TCP just needs a network layer to function. IP is the modern network layer (layer 3) that all routers use to communicate. I have very little experience with this layer, but I do believe routing equipment would be mostly "hard-coded" to use the IP protocol.
That being said a modern networking stack is usually built directly into the hardware. Intel and Broadcom networking controllers defer TCP to the controller itself rather than the OS or even driver code. This is called TCP offloading. Most (if not all) offloading code would run locally to the network controller and likely closed source.
In embedded applications, source code usually needs to be available to the system building it but often have proprietary licensing.
Here is the Linux IPV4 stack source code if you are so inclined.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/net/ipv4
To further your point, unless we move networking into user-space which is a very dumb idea for many reasons imo, we will need to "rely" on proprietary IP hardware stacks if we want performance. As far as DNS goes, yeah that's actually centralized and "controlled" by the state. However I believe we should do whatever bitcoin does. TMK bitcoin primarily relies on DNS for node discovery and some basic security.
If anyone sees this and wants to contribute to open hardware and operating systems the Redbean project could use your help I'm sure, I could get you in touch!
Personally I think we should be WAY more worried about TLS/SSL and certificate authorities. This is usually the first way countries censor network activity. I cannot find any articles, but I heard back in 2022 Microsoft issued an update that removed root certificates from Russian devices.
I have been building my own HTTP server from scratch because I felt there were so few options, it just gets worse the lower level you go. The more technical, the few eyeballs are qualified to work on it.
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