In elaborate terms: you have the ability to change any one of the protocols, specifications, designs or standards of the above at their proposal stage or before their mass adoption. You may choose to modify or reject an existing one or create one by yourself.
Some users and I would have common ideas in mind, however I would love to see some esoteric ideas as well.
The internet would be free, operated and maintained by the postal service.
Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.
I’d make the internet automatically fact check everything
How?
Like, it’s hard enough for a group of humans to credibly do, because of the whole “who minds the minders” issue. The internet infrastructure itself couldn’t even tell the town of Scunthorp from profanity very well, until recently with the advent of LLMs.
I haven’t really thought through how
Valid.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God’s transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
UDP is for video streams and other applications where a couple of dropped packets do not matter. Triple handshakes are kinda pointless for these types of data transfers.
Every packet is born equal. It is heresy how some people believe that some little packets, born with a certain task, are worth so little that we can just “drop” them. Imagine poor little Bobby packet #93736, on his school field trip, carrying a pixel of your stupid Microsoft teams meeting… but he gets lost in the crowd and left behind by the rest of the class.
Bobby Packet will never see his family again.
“Too much overhead”, they said. “It’s okay if we lose a few”. Billions of little packets are lost daily, forever, all because UDPcels believe in file packet supremacy, and that Bobby Packet “didn’t matter”.
TCP is proof of a loving God. In a TCP world, the teacher would do a head count… and figure out that Bobby Tables had gone missing. He would shout RETRANSMISSION! He would search ceaselessly just to find Bobby Packet again. And he will.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
I’ve said this for years, but not about technology. Just a complete worldwide ban.
Provide yellow pages type of thing you can look up businesses in, companies can “advertise” on their entry, with a separate resource to look up information and data about them.
Throw in word of mouth, and that’s it. Free market determines everything else. Also, no logos on any product. The products can’t become the advertisement either.
But if take this rule back to like the (19)00s, so we just head off radio and TV commercials before the get go.
Maybe this prevents capitalism from becoming what it is in the first place. The main thing is presenting objective facts alongside the ads, so people don’t just buy something because “it said it was the best”. (Maybe that could extend to preventing people from believing something because “it said it was true” as well >_>)
If only…
You’d need to still have a whitelist, so putting the name of your store on the front of the store or telling a friend about a cool new thing you bought is allowed. But yes.
In a similar vein, letting websites render whatever they can imagine has proven ripe for abuse. Basic HTML is a kind of whitelist of it’s own.
The best definition I have come up with so far is to ban ‘Party A compensating party B via money, goods, or services for displaying and/or broadcasting media to party C, in particular and/or in general, without party C’s specific consent and request.’ The only exception might be to allow it for companies that both A. have an annualized revenue less than 10x the median wage, and B. are not making a profit. That would be just to allow small businesses to get the word out at the start but would cut off anything getting to the point where it should be self-sustaining.
One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.
Make it so that security is a priority when developing a standard, protocol, or specification. Even at present, new stuff is developed for functionality first, with security coming in later. IMO they should be developed in tandem, secure by design.
Definitely. Insecure protocols linger on for ages even after we have better options. The internet used to run on unsecured HTTP, FTP, and Telnet, and it took decades for their encrypted successors to make headway and become the default.
I think email is the last major old protocol that’s still blatantly terrible, but it’s too deeply entrenched/too decentralized to do anything about.
Stop IPv6 from existing.
Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.
Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.
oh god, the nightmare that “adding a fifth number” would be
It would be less of a nightmare than changing all our addresses to add four more sets, be alphanumeric, and to change the separator.
The design team flew too close to the sun with that.
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it’s ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we’d stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can’t challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we’ll never get to the point where it could replace it.
In the context of changing the course of things early on, I’d make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat’s already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don’t think we can unscramble that egg.
But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we’d have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.
I’ll just go with introducing IPv6 from the very start
This.
Everyone is directly connected to the network.
Everyone can host anything we want. No centralisation.
Trivial peer to peer.
A whole ecosystem of worms infesting every computer.
…
Wait, no, not that last one.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
I wonder if Gates would still go along the personality trajectory he’s had if he was even more powerful.
