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If you don't need SSL you can't use HTTP/2 or HTTP/3. It doesn't make sense for externally facing services but sometimes is ok or even unavoidable for local networks

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You can use HTTP/2 without encryption - it's called `h2c`. It's not technically standards-compliant and browsers don't support it, but it's used a lot for proxy-to-backend communication where traffic goes over localhost and/or over an internal private network.

HTTP/2 without encryption is still standards compliant if you initiate the connection with prior knowledge that the protocol is supported. It's upgrading from HTTP/1.1 that isn't supposed to be supported.

But of course, the only scenarios where you have prior knowledge are things like reverse proxies or custom made clients.

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