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Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

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Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#111

Post by asciimov »

jjav wrote: post #106

Honestly, just one thing, and I only need to go back to the early 90s. Just before the Internet was opened to commercial use in the mid 90s, would've made a perpetual prohibition of advertising over the Internet. Ads are what have ruined everything. Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect consequence of someone trying hard to make you…

Ad's got us here to begin with. Without ads the internet would have been only for the rich.

There would also have been no google, no amazon, no android, no kindles. I'd still be ordering everything from the Sears Catalogue, waiting 6-8 weeks for it to arrive.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#112

Post by whatshisface »

tpmx wrote: post #76
an_opabinia wrote: post #18

The most toxic part of the Internet today is identity. Some of the IP address space should have worked like mobile phone numbers - paid for by subscribers and representing single identities. Even better, after the invention of RSA, the government should have backed ISPs or states issuing signing identities for a protocol level identity standard - sort of like SIM cards that would “represent” you on a single, authorit…

What you're suggesting is a dystopia.

I think they were being sarcastic, given that they're writing it under a pseudonym.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#113

Post by busterarm »

_huayra_ wrote: post #25

Honestly most of it is pretty great. Folks who want to give it better, more reliable performance end up reinventing circuit switching, and anything involving security is difficult to solve at the IP layer. The last big things to secure are DNS (can be done with DNSSEC), and possibly somehow mandate TLS for connections (although you definitely don't want that all the time). One big glaring problem is BGP, which we don…

> One big glaring problem is BGP,

I see what you did there :D

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#114

Post by Y_Y »

tpmx wrote: post #76
an_opabinia wrote: post #18

The most toxic part of the Internet today is identity. Some of the IP address space should have worked like mobile phone numbers - paid for by subscribers and representing single identities. Even better, after the invention of RSA, the government should have backed ISPs or states issuing signing identities for a protocol level identity standard - sort of like SIM cards that would “represent” you on a single, authorit…

What you're suggesting is a dystopia.

Just as an alternative to a different dystopia though.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#116

Post by Hamuko »

aspyct wrote: post #83
abecedarius wrote: post #4

The most basic problems seem to be: 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern. 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So the technical constraints probably did not force this.) I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s: https://c…

IPv4 adresses fit in a standard 4byte integer, that might be a reason. Quite frankly, if they didn't allocate full /24 to single entities (including localhost...), we might still have enough addresses left.

>we might still have enough addresses left.

For how long?

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#117

Post by handrous »

dbingham wrote: post #38

Find a way to better decentralize it, so that it doesn't rely on single hosts(and later sites) as the source of truth for any particular function. The original idea was that protocols would allow any one to participate by simply making their own webpage. But dynamic IP addresses, the DNS system, and even just HTML design were out of reach for most people so that got lost and monsterous websites under centralized cont…

> The aim is to create a world where central platforms are not dominant

Centralization has been greatly enabled by it being legal to hoover up all kinds of user data and monetize it by selling ads or using it for ML training. Huge moats, unassailable by anyone trying to charge money directly and discouraging interest and participation even in free, volunteer efforts (since the commercial ones are already no-charge...) while encouraging players to jealously keep their users captive, avoiding open protocols and certainly not developing new ones (notice how application-level network protocol development and support started to dry up fast as FB and Google's money-printing machines really started to get going?).

I'd say the shortest path to fixing the Internet is making that illegal, especially since that activity is also horrible and dangerous for other reasons. Ideally, the same law would hamstring the credit reporting agencies and also keep banks and other financial institutions from using/selling your data.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#118

Post by mattzito »

jjav wrote: post #106

Honestly, just one thing, and I only need to go back to the early 90s. Just before the Internet was opened to commercial use in the mid 90s, would've made a perpetual prohibition of advertising over the Internet. Ads are what have ruined everything. Take just about anything unpleasant about the Internet today and it is either directly a consequence of ads, or an indirect consequence of someone trying hard to make you…

It's interesting, I wonder if the internet would have been successful at all without something to monetize? Yeah, e-commerce probably would have been doable, but it would have been like the dotcom era - generic domain names running ads to try to get you to walk over to a desktop computer and type in the domain name.

Digital communities would have been really hard - a lot of online forums, I know, depend(ed) on advertising to pay for the then-expensive hosting costs. I'm a believer that Facebook now is long past its prime, but I remember how exciting it was in the early days when it was connecting me with family members and friends. Advertising is how all of those things were able to become accessible to everyone.

Maybe a better solution would have been to ban personalized advertising? A lot of the really gross behaviors with ad exchanges, data brokers, ISP interception, etc. are all to allow for highly targeted and personalized ads. Maybe you could only target ads towards "interests", which could be set at a browser level, and a user could configure if they wanted to see more relevant ads.

Re: Ask HN: You have one shot to redesign the Internet – what do you change?

#119

Post by dxbydt »

i had to answer this question on my computer networks exam ages ago. i forget my exact answer, but it was along the lines of “ATM is the greatest tech since sliced bread. IP is bad because connectionless blah blah… therefore http over tcp over atm better than http over tcp over ip”

i passed the course.

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