Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?

Is DNS really a perfect protocol? How can it be improved?

We should have had DHCP prefix delegation for IPv4 so people wouldn't need NAT.

Elements that know they're user-editable (images with upload controls attached to them to replace the image that's there, dates that trigger calendar controls when clicked, and inline editing for other elements that actually works and is consistent across browsers).

An offline database in the browser that has the concept of user accounts and resetting passwords baked in, as well as subscription payments, and has a universal API that can be automatically deployed to any hosting platform.

All of this would make building web apps and games trivial for so many more people -- write some basic HTML, upload it to one of a million platforms of your choice with a click, and you have a testing ground for a product that can grow.

It would be a way for anyone on the internet to build something useful and get it out there without learning a thousand technologies with a thousand nuances.

While the spam problem is much better than it used to be, that's because there's a whole lot of behind-the-scenes (and expensive) infrastructure devoted to combating it.

That infrastructure has also made it considerably more difficult to run your own mail server. While you can still do it, there are many hoops to jump through if you want to keep your mail from being dropped on the floor by the first overzealous spam filter it encounters. Unless you're big enough to devote a staff just to that (or you have a lot of free time) it's easier (but more expensive) to just use MailGun, MailChimp, or one of their brethren.

I would guess that the annual cost of spam is somewhere in the billions.

Facebook was famously started and hosted in a dorm room. But this was only possible due to the history of Harvard within the advent of the internet and the fact that they had such an excess of addresses that Zuck could bind to a public IP address. We’ll never know what tiny services could have blown up if people didn’t hit this wall.

I started off with computers by hosting garrysmod servers. My brother started off with computers by hosting a website dedicated to the digital tv switchover in Wisconsin (lol). This was only possible because my dad was a software engineer and paid a bit extra to get us 5 dedicated IP addresses. If he didn’t understand that, who knows what me or my brother would be doing today.

Anyway, I say IPv6.