[wvenable]

Most clients support it implicitly; you probably have to go out of your way to get an uncompressed stream. Now compressing a verbose text string is not optimal but given the past attempts I'd hesitate against using a pre-packed format. Historically that has not worked out well. Compressing the text format is ultimately the worse-is-better solution.

[jwilk]

They are using libcurl, for which you need to request compression explicitly:

https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING.html