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

This was just an idle conversation we were having at work. Imagine that one day you wake up and you've been sent back in time, where you are now a researcher at DARPA in the early 1960s. You've got the influence to effect fundamental changes in the next sixty years of the Internet's history, and can make your changes any time in the next sixty years - but you know that as soon as you change one thing in history, you'll be sent back to 2021, to continue living in the world you have wrought.

How are you going to make the Internet better?

Imagine if 1980s security (single DES, no public key crypto) was baked into IP though.

This is a really great question! I can't help but think that for some small multiple of the cost of the International Space Station or Large Hadron Collider or any other large government science experiment, the nations of the earth could have gotten together early on and funded a free satellite internet project. It would have been limited bandwidth, high latency and error-ridden but it would have been ubiquitous in coverage, much like the GPS system. And would have accelerated adoption of many of the digital cash and e-banking innovations we are seeing today. As well as gotten a jump start on the physical layer of space based internet ;)

I don’t know how it would be implemented but I always thought it would have been better if there was more meaningful separation of domains, and that you need a different browser to connect to a different domain. That way the net could be divided. There could be a domain for only verified information. A domain for public use. A domain for only educational content, etc. I have no idea how it would be moderated though

Security should have been been a top priority right from the start. It is very strange that ARPA, a DOD agency that sponsored most of the Internet technology, cared so little about security.