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.
Here’s an esoteric one: Kill the internet (as we know it) before it begins.
Okay, hear me out. Internetworking existed before HTTP and websites, and once the system of routing was there it was inevitable it would be used for all the things it is today. Email came first, and what is the Fediverse but an automated, abstracted-from-the-user email system?
With no HTTP, somebody comes up with the idea of an application that formats your mailing lists into one navigable page, and then somebody else starts caching mailing list emails at the server until requested by a user (like an instance). SMTP directly transitions into ActivityPub, and there’s no need to build platforms overtop which can be monopolised. We might get to skip the Zuckerbergs and surveillance capitalism entirely.
I’m not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.
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.
European computer builders joining MSX and expanding it to 16 and 32 bits.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple’s toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity’s knowledge in their pocket… They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn’t mean HAVING knowledge.
The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.
This one will be super controversial, but I’d say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.
It’s tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.
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 >_>)
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.
IDK how I’d do it, but I’d absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.
Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a “totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold” type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.
I’d stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
It could have been Python 🤷♂️ Imagine of Mosaic and Netscape had gone by that road.
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.
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VBScript.
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.
That’s interesting - I hadn’t heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the “IPv5” way?
This is a pretty good takedown of IPv6 but I think the biggest problem with its adoption is the addresses. They look like gobbledygook just so we can give everything a public address and it made it a lot more fiddly to configure.
just so we can give everything a public address
Giving everything a public address was the original intent! NAT didn’t even exist prior to '94 and it was (and is) a massive kludge.
Although not adopted, but ipv5 was mainly a proposal for streaming. https://itsfoss.com/what-happened-to-ipv5/
IPv5 existed. It was called the Internet Stream Protocol. The fact IPv4 used 4 octets was a happy coincidence more than anything, so v5 wouldn’t necessarily imply a
ninth chevronfifth octet.But IPv4+, whatever that might have been, could have been an extensible system like, say, Unicode, and taken advantage of the unallocated/reserved 240.0.0.0/4 block to flag that the address is longer and the rest is encoded elsewhere in the packet.
I mean, if you want to go completely crazy, you could specify ~2^28 further octets with such a system… although requiring a 256+ megabyte MTU might be slightly too extreme.
They should make the next IP standard spin. Spinning is so much cooler than not spinning.
I’d like to know how things would’ve turned out if they hadn’t made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.
We would have never had all of the money blown on the infra that actually enabled the explosive growth after the dotcom bust. Probably would require a university account to access. And you’d probably be billed for all the bits
It’d still get there, probably; technologies tend to arise over and over again. But much more slowly.
Maybe illegal, small-scale commercial activity would fill the space until they’re forced to open it up. Maybe it would develop first in a non-Western nation with lax regulations.
One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.
