A socket has to pick one, but your application doesn’t.

You can hedge your bets and open a connection and send data to _all_ of them, and pick whichever returns faster.

This of course requires you to know about the application-layer protocol.

For HTTP, you need to restrict this strategy to GET methods, for example.

Hence why it can’t be part of the socket interface.

You can always build higher level abstractions on top of sockets if you need them.