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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?

#311

Post by dublin »

8bitsrule wrote: post #196

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.

Until the late 90's the entire Internet was this way - even .com domains were subject to the Internet AUPs (Acceptable Use Policies) that strictly banned "commercial" use of the Internet.

AUPs lasted only a very short time after O'Reilly showed their Global Network Navigator site at Interop showcasing the capabilites of a new graphical web browser from NCSA called Mosaic that could - gasp! - display inline images along with the HTML hypertext! (Probably hard for the younger crowd here to believe, but early browsers had to open images in a separate window, sometimes with a separate image viewer helper program. Yeah, really. Mosaic was a game-changer, that made the vision of the modern web obvious to at least 1% of the people who saw it.)

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

#312

Post by krapp »

notamy wrote: post #120

Javascript. Not to remove it, but to make it better from the start. Current JS feels painful to me because it feels like piling hacks on top of a poorly-designed language to make it palatable. Doing it better from the start sounds amazing.

It would have been nice if the original idea to have the web support multiple scripting languages had panned out. That's not a design problem, though - some form of code running in the browser would have been inevitable, and it was considered as a possibility from the beginning - but it seems inevitable in hindsight that one language would have won out and we would have all been stuck with whatever quirks and pecadillos that language had.

Maybe if something like webassembly had come along earlier, we could have avoided all that "javascript as bytecode" nonsense.

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

#313

Post by harel »

dublin wrote: post #299
ant6n wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just realised (or remembered) it's a business. Exactly, it became evil!

99.99% of businesses are NOT evil. But Google most certainly IS actively evil - perhaps the most evil of an increasingly evil lot. ...and I don't use the word evil lightly.

I strongly believe between evil and stupidity/incompetence the latter wins, always.

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

#314

Post by streamofdigits »

Its a darn difficult question. The "internet" is the first time humanity got a technology for information exchange that can scale arbitrarily. It creates a complete graph that can enable data exchange between any two individuals (and of course an arbitrary additional number of devices).

How this increadible technical potential got translated into social reality says more about society than the technology[0]. If the stack of applications that has been built on top of it has become dystopic it is because society had dystopia in its dna. The technology simply allowed it to be expressed, so to speak.

By the same token, any technical tweak that maintained or improved this scalability would simply have led to an alternate dystopia. It may be counterintuitive but maybe the only internet that would actually be "better" would have been a more local / less scaling version. A more gradual transition might have given society time to adapt, develop some defense mechanisms and not be dominated by the lowest common denominator

[0] Keep in mind that all communication technologies of the 20th century (phone, radio, TV) quickly degenerated and never delivered the utopia initially projected

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

#315

Post by _huayra_ »

iptrans wrote: post #54
_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…

There are only about 100k ASNs. It would be fairly easy to solve the bootstrapping problem by just preloading all the keys.

Yes that isn't too many, but right now any device can just hop on a network and start communicating (after DHCP). Not only that, but they can start communicating with any public IP address.

If people decided to take this away by adding some security directly into the IP layer (i.e. such that communicating without it is impossible, such as mandatory IPsec), I don't think the tradeoff would be worth it. Now you would have to manage all the normal stuff that comes with keys (e.g. expiration and renewal), and you may find your device gets wedged if you don't do the delicate key expiry dance correctly (i.e. you can't even connect to the site to get updated keys).

It's very easy to say "those DARPA morons not designing security was a big mistake!", but I am not convinced that the tradeoffs of solving it at the internet level (i.e. L4 and down) are worth the bootstrapping / flexibility hits.

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

#316

Post by swman »

Just have the internet be a bunch of data streams that people can start/pause/stop any time. It would be "real time" from the beginning, and then you can just build whatever around these streams.

It'd be like my brain broadcast just multi subscription stream, bunch of inputs and reacting to those events.

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

#317

Post by softwaredoug »

Accepting but regulating centralization of the Web

I think we failed to appreciate how much the average user would need centralized services (Search & Social) to use the Web. Both of these services are around discoverability of content. Humans want a water cooler to visit and chit-chat, or an organized library to look for information.

Additionally, because accessing the Web was seen at first as "free" (outside your ISP), people would gravitate towards "free" centralized services like Facebook and Google.

This created a recipe for what we see today with the incredible power of these companies over so many aspects of our lives.

So what would I think should be different? I would have been more thoughtful about regulating these centralized services in the way the FCC regulates the airwaves & media companies. Which is even more proactive than antitrust law. It's OK that they're profitable. That's good! But we ought to avoid single companies owning the entire search / social space.

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

#318

Post by LeonB »

dublin wrote: post #298
LeonB wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ted Nelson envisaged micro-payments as part of the underlying platform (he invented … waves vaguely … all of this)

I'm a huge Ted Nelson fan, but what we have is very different from what he's envisioned over the years. (Even Xanadu is very arguably not a single concept - it's evolved significantly over time, and although Ted doesn't miss much, the power and development pace of personal/portable computers and smartphones seems to have surprised even him - we don't see many roadside Xanadu stands with the big flaming X...)

(Agree, that’s why I only waved vaguely, lol. Ted is full on.)
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