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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?

#191

Post by teraflop »

karaterobot wrote: post #153

Not sure how to accomplish it, but advertisements should be captured in a semantically distinct way in markup. I hate ads, but I'm not saying you can't have them if you want, you just have to wrap them in the equivalent ../ tags, so that there is no question about what content contains an advertisement and what doesn't. That way, it's trivial for me to block them. The flip side of the coin is that my browser will tel…

Even if you could come up with an "objective" definition of what counts as an advertisement, what incentive do site owners have to be honest about it? Likewise, why would I want my browser to tell the site that I'm blocking ads?

This idea reminds me of the Evil Bit: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514

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

#192

Post by topspin »

asciimov wrote: post #102
onion2k wrote: post #90

I'd make payments a prominent, application-native, easy to use feature from Day 1, right down in the network protocol level. 100% of the transaction would be transferred from the user to the service owner without a middle-man service taking a cut (payment gateway fees not withstanding). That way there wouldn't be any need to rely on advertising, app stores, or external subscriptions to run something on the internet.

That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor. I remember my dad scraping enough money to buy us a computer in '97 with unlimited internet (aol was still selling the internet by the minute back then). As a kid who hardly ever had enough money to buy a comic let alone magazine, and who's local library was lacking, it was life changing being able to just lookup and read about anything for free.

> That would have just made the internet in accessible to the poor.

We have that problem now, apparently. Every consent decree that happens to some monster ISP includes a "low cost service for poor people" mandate.

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

brundolf wrote: post #178

IPv6 from the beginning. I have a theory that NAT killed the open web. There was this idea at the beginning that everyone could host their own website, email, etc. But when you're behind a router, you suddenly have to be quite technical in order to set all that up on the computer in your room. So only (bored) technical people bother. It's possible this is the reason platforms came to dominate.

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by jjav »

mattzito wrote: post #118
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 advert…

> without something to monetize?

Not without something to monetize. Just no advertising.

Commerce sites would exist largely as-today in this alternate universe.

Early on there was a lot of interest in micropayments for funding sites with interesting content. That pretty much all dies because it was a harder problem to kickstart off the ground than just stuffing every page full of ads.

But, with ads prohibited, the Internet would've evolved differently and we'd probably have a very convenient way to pay some fraction of a penny to any site we frequent, all with zero ads and none of the toxic consequences of forcing people to view ads.

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

#195

Post by kodablah »

Animats wrote: post #122

Changes I would have made in the early days: - 48-bit static IP addresses. 70 trillion should be enough. 128 bits was overkill. - Nodes, not interfaces, have IP addresses, so you can use multiple paths. - IPSEC available but initially optional. - Explicit congestion notification, so packet loss and congestion loss can be distinguished. - Everything on the wire is little-endian, byte oriented, and twos complement. - Y…

> Mail is not forwarded

Go one further, mail is pulled, not sent. One such approach is https://tonsky.me/blog/streams/. It'd be hard to prevent moats and people might still coalesce into a few popular middlemen, but at least spam would be reduced. Spam is the primary reason client-side/self-hosted mail is left to the tech-savvy.

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

#196

Post by 8bitsrule »

At least one domain where NO commercial activity is allowed. No buying, selling, advertising, trading. Companies who are convicted of mens rea transgression (along with whichever employees are guilty) lose ALL access to the internet in perpetuity.

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

#197

Post by mprovost »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #123
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…

I might have read somewhere that the original design of HTTP allowed for transactions to occur. This free point is a big one. Once Apple set the price of 0.99 for an app it really dropped the market price for software. It's funny that there is so little different between enterprise software and consumer apps except for a monstrous difference in price point. Funny thing is, consumer apps are sometimes better.

The 402 HTTP status code is "Payment Required". At one time people envisioned micropayments etc but it never went anywhere.

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

#199

Post by generalizations »

brundolf wrote: post #184
btgeekboy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd subscribe to that theory. The port forwarding issue is a few clicks; actually getting a site to host is another issue entirely. Even if it was some application you ran on your desktop 24/7 that holds your hand through the process, NAT + DHCP aren't insurmountable.

Port forwarding + static IP. And don't be so sure that it's trivial; despite having taken a course on the network stack I'd have to do some research to figure out port-forwarding and get it set up correctly. Normal people's response would be, "What's a port? Like the holes on the back of the computer?" In an IPv6 world you could have a free program you download that gives you an interface like Squarespace except you…

Is there any way to get there from where we are now? Seems like even with ipv6 we still have to use routers.

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

#200

Post by karaterobot »

teraflop wrote: post #191
karaterobot wrote: post #153

Not sure how to accomplish it, but advertisements should be captured in a semantically distinct way in markup. I hate ads, but I'm not saying you can't have them if you want, you just have to wrap them in the equivalent ../ tags, so that there is no question about what content contains an advertisement and what doesn't. That way, it's trivial for me to block them. The flip side of the coin is that my browser will tel…

Even if you could come up with an "objective" definition of what counts as an advertisement, what incentive do site owners have to be honest about it? Likewise, why would I want my browser to tell the site that I'm blocking ads? This idea reminds me of the Evil Bit: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3514

> Not sure how to accomplish it

I am hoping that the same technology that transported me back in time and made me director of DARPA would help me solve those issues.

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