

Ask HN: If you had a chance to rebuild the internet, what would you change? - c1sc0

True anonymity at the lowest level of the stack? No ads? Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS + JS) * browsers) we have now? Built-in state?
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mattjung
Usage, technology, resources, bottlenecks - all have been changing all along
the time and further will change. The ideal solution of today will not be a
good solution for tomorrow. What you call mess, is the result of an
evolutionary development that will be replaced by something appropriate when
the time has come. Although your question is surely mind-challenging, it
assumes that a bright from-scratch design would beat the outcome of the
competition of different technologies. I don't believe in that.

~~~
c1sc0
edited the original to add quotes around 'mess' ... guess I'm just cranky from
the javascript nightmares I've been having lately.

I agree with letting evolution & competition do its work, so let me rephrase:
"Given the opportunity to re-arrange the basic conditions out of which the
internet evolved (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, HTML, ...) what would you change." The
choices encoded in these standards are as much ethical/philosophical as
technical. Do we value security? Openness? Speed?

I agree with IPv6 & getting rid of NAT on a technical level. What else?

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Get the technical level right and the rest will come.

Mechanism, not policy.

------
maw
1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently
inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be.

2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively
limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the
DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also
still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of
encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).

~~~
diego
Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs,
twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an
extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate
cheaply also enables spam.

A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail
mail is not free and you still get junk mail.

~~~
cturner
How does spam make its way into twitter?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Spammers set up account and then mass-follow other accounts. See also
<http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/> and
<http://www.twitterspam.com/> .

I've never used Twitter, I just found those two links by Googling for "Twitter
spam".

~~~
cturner
Thanks. I've been thinking about these problems recently
([http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-
replaceme...](http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replacement-
mechanism.html)), and twitter is the foremost model I've had in mind as an
example of a spam-proof system!

I still think the model is good. The follower spam problem described in those
links (this too: <http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/>) is indeed spam
but could be could be fixed without it breaking the essence of the twitter
approach.

I'm convinced that spam is a result of weaknesses in the model of the email
system and not inevitable as you suggest. If we had our time again we would be
able to standardise on a better model and for this reason was a bit surprised
that you just accepted spam as part of life.

The blog link at the top describes some of my thoughts. Models that involve
variable payments work as well because they directly price on how much you
want to be paid by people who waste your time. In such a world I'd love it for
people to spam me.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I think you have me confused with someone else -- my first entry into this
thread was my post above providing the links to information on Twitter spam.

That said, I mentioned in another comment in another thread that I have to
spend some of my time dealing with spam and all of its people effects on a
pretty regular basis. I've also screwed around on the 'net since Mosaic, and
dialed in to local BBSes before that (I started young :-).

In my opinion, any form of two-way communication which allows anonymous entry
will be vulnerable to spam. I certainly can't think of a workaround for that,
and nobody else has managed to yet, either. I agree that Twitter spam has a
good chance of being eradicated once they tighten things up a little. However,
in part they have that chance because Twitter isn't fully bidirectional --
there's no way that I know of for a Twitter user to send messages to someone
who hasn't signed up to follow the user.

------
izak30
I would change almost nothing on the web side of things. Having no ads would
seriously change the business of the internet today. Who would foot the bill
for everything that we use now? End-users?

HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers
actually work together, instead of being limited (VS.NET), it also allows for
quick (albeit not always concurrent) innovation, and competition. TCP/IP Is so
well generalized that you can do anything with it. Redundancy is not well
executed, but it doesn't have to be if the pipes get bigger.

Doing things like calling new developers "incompetent morons" stifles
innovation. I certainly would have quit a long time ago, if when I started
there was no room for mistakes.

HTML and Javascript were the 'gateway language' for me for all sorts of
things.

~~~
indiejade
"HTML is a leveler for a lot of people, and it helps designers and developers
actually work together, instead of being limited . . . "

Precisely. It used to annoy me when people would ask me what language I
"program in". I've since learned to just explain that I write code that can be
rendered, downloaded, executed, or otherwise modified (locally and remotely)
through a browser or IDE and without (necessarily) having to be connected to
the Internet.

But anyway. I think if I had the chance to rebuild the Internet, I'd build in
an all-inclusive productivity-meter. This productivity meter would gauge,
record and reward people as both content producers and consumers/participants
of media. This question reminds me. . . there's actually an interesting piece
in this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUHtc37MC8>

about that concept of ripping down the barriers between producers and
consumers of media.

~~~
c1sc0
Such a productivity meter (mind if I rephrase it as 'contribution-meter'?)
assumes strong identity, the lack of which I think has greatly contributed to
the rise of the internet.

At the same time strong identity is at the core of the whole OpenID /
OpenSocial /Social Graph debate. Are we trying to build something that should
have been included in the first place?

~~~
indiejade
Interesting question. I think the "lack of identity" to which you refer has
greatly contributed to the rise of Telecom and Internet giants. Also has it
likely played a significant part in the erosion of Net Neutrality. There are
still far too many corporate-centric entities which control or wish to control
and influence what is or becomes popular or noted in traditional media outlets
(television, radio, cable, etc.)

Traditional media relies upon what marketing people call "push advertising"
where people are encouraged to take what is being said in the
commercial/infomercial as fact. The Internet, however, is literally able to
generate its own "pull advertising" as it enables people to participate and
research between or among alternatives. Think of the Mac VS PC VS Linux
spoofs. Apple spends zillions of dollars in advertising (which is one of the
reasons their products are so expensive!) and many PC manufacturers do, too
("Dude! You're getting a Dell). But Linux doesn't have any advertising, really
. . . (Novell does not count), but that hasn't prevented it from gaining
momentous adoption in recent years.

But anyway, before going too off-topic:

Maybe it's not that strong identity should have been "included in the first
place," but that the infrastructure could have been planned better to include
room for a more equitable exchange among "providers" and "producers" and
"consumers". After all, it's not like the ISPs or Internet giants are actually
the entities _producing_ most of what is interesting or useful on the web. Of
course, those touting themselves as "providers" would like most people to
equate them and pay them as "producers" and such.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Man, a lot of people here are violently opposed to allowing invalid markup. I
think that the lenience web browsers afford site creators is a boon. It is one
of the key factors in the democratization of the web. Low barriers to entry
have been a critical factor in the success and organic growth of the web.
Requiring perfect syntax and markup as a method of keeping out the plebes is
the kind of self-righteous cult-of-the-machine which drives out the very
people who provide content and value to the web.

Now, if you _do_ have correct markup and the browser developers still screw it
up... off with their heads! Shame on you, you should know better.

~~~
ken
Shouldn't we "democratize" other programs, then? How about making GCC or CLISP
accept incorrect syntax? That would allow more people to provide content and
value.

We might end up with a lot of programs that only compiled correctly on one
platform (gcc quirks mode!), but it would lower the barrier-to-entry for new
programmers.

------
brlewis
S-expression syntax for markup, Scheme in place of JavaScript, and I'd like
HTTP to have a header that sets modification times or other cache information
for resources other than the one being sent in the current response.

------
ropiku
IPv6 instead of IPv4. No NAT and enough IP's for all your network devices
(pda, laptop, printer, etc.)

~~~
wanorris
Well, I think the IPv6 switch is finally going to have to happen anyway within
a few years. So hopefully, you'll get your wish.

~~~
ropiku
I'm hoping too but currently no ISP I know has IPv6 support for customers
(they may have on their backbone).

------
newtoncorp
How can you have innovation if you get a standard runtime environment ?

If I would do something I wouldn't display the pages if the markup isn't
correct.

------
asenchi
I agree with mark_ellul, reverse domain name resolution.

com.google.maps etc...

I'd also like to see more crypto.

------
tomjen
Strong Crypto from the ground up. Binary standards instead of HTML, so if
anything is broken even the least it cannot be displayed.

JS goes out the window and is replaced by a scheme like language that can
process HBML as if it was native list.

But those are minor points when you compare it to the first.

------
bayareaguy
DNS.

I don't know exactly what I'd change, but I'd look for a way to make it
impractical for the whole domain/certificate "industry" to get where it is
today. ICANN, Verisign, Network Solutions and the like are all just scams.

------
sah
_Standard runtime environment to target instead of the 'mess' of ((DOM + CSS +
JS) x browsers) we have now?_

This is what I've always wanted. When the web first took off, I was constantly
whining about how remote application UIs were going to get shoehorned into the
model of _document layout_ , of all things. It seemed short-sighted and dumb.

In retrospect, I'm not sure the web could have become what it is with
something more like java applets, flash, or AJAX in the forefront. Document
layout isn't what we're really doing, but it's a simple starting point that
everyone can get behind.

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bsaunder
I think IP and TCP/UDP work pretty well... seems like they messed up a bit on
the size of the address space. That's what I would call the "internet" (along
with some general services, e.g. DNS). Sounds like you are talking more about
HTTP/HTML.

True anonymity seems a bit hard (when you make a request, the reply has to go
somewhere).

With regards to the "standard runtime environment"... I'd add true
bidirectional communication, and a built in local storage mechanism (though
Google gearbox and the flash hack seem to have mitigated this).

UPDATE: (fixed some cases).

------
axod
Why do some people want anonymity? Bad idea IMHO

Privacy? Yes of course. Anonymity? Definitely not - just means people can do
what they want without any come back.

~~~
c1sc0
Tell that to people in some more oppressive regimes, or in places where the
alignment between what is legal and what makes sense is out of sync. True
anonymity is hard to implement, but it certainly has its virtues.

~~~
phaedrus
Interestingly though my college professors were talking about Internet2 and
they seem to think the problem is _too much_ anonymity; they want the US
government to be able to track down any communications, you know, to catch
"teh terrists"

Edit: Not saying that's what internet2 is for, just what my CS professors were
speculating it needs to do.

~~~
axod
For me, it's more a question of responsibility. If everyone is anonymous,
there is no accountability. There's no reason to be responsible. No reason to
be well behaved.

On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post
incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
_On an anonymous internet, you can just attack websites you don't like, post
incorrect claims, abuse people and be a complete pain in the neck._

You can do that already. On the other hand, if you have anonymity you can
still choose to give yourself a name and identity. With strong identity you
can even prove that it's you. Or at least that it's the same person each time.

There are lots of good reasons to allow anonymity.

------
aneesh
Build in semantics from the ground up.

~~~
c1sc0
if & when we figure out the semantics in the first place, but I agree: some
mechanism for adding metadata at a low level would be great. (Ya, I know,
microformats)

------
ionfish
Do you mean the internet, or the web?

~~~
c1sc0
I meant internet but most people seem to focus on web these days. For example
I miss the old usenet days.

------
mark_ellul
reverse domain name resolution... eg. org.reprap

~~~
ericwaller
I'm sure you're not being facetious, but I can't figure it out. What's the
advantage of this?

~~~
c1sc0
I think he points to the fact that reverse domains look a lot more like tree
structures which humans are inherently very capable of understanding. With the
current system the human url decoding process goes something like this:

* "Find the third forward slash in this string ..." * "Read backwards & split on dot, there ya go: the tree path of the organization giving me this information ..." * "Now, skip forward to that slash again ..." * "From here on, split on the slash & that will be the tree path leading to the data this organization wants to give me"

We're probably all conditioned to it now, but it's not exactly beautiful ...

~~~
ericwaller
Ok yeah, com.google.mail/inbox preserves the tree hierarchy

~~~
jimbokun
So, instead of the dot com bust, we would have had a com dot bust?

------
vegai
Luckily, people smarter than any of us thought about this a lot already.
Unfortunately, with that sort of brain power comes craziness.

Check out the articles and books by Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and Vannevar
Bush.

------
Kaizyn
If we were to rebuild the Internet today, we should remake it using a fully
decentralized model instead of a distributed one. By turning it into a mesh
network, it would make it a lot more robust.

------
b3n
I would remove extensions from domains, e.g., "news.ycombinator.com" would
just be "news.ycombinator", and "google.com" would just be "google".

------
juansequeda
Would of created the Semantic Web initially.. would of solved data integration
problems on the way too!

------
volida
if you think something is wrong with the Internet, then build a startup around
the problem.

~~~
jimbokun
Heh, what do you suppose the intent of the question was? He's fishing for
startup ideas!

------
beng
an extra level of indirection in all protocols for redundancy. the MX records
in dns for mail are a good example. it's currently rather tricky to get good
redundancy (fault tolerance) in software.

------
yariv
Persistent connections to the server from Javascript.

------
attack
Kill NAT!

------
kashif
No concept of bandwidth

~~~
kashif
Why did I get down modded!

~~~
Hexstream
Because it doesn't make any sense? How can you possibly have internet "without
the concept of bandwidth"? Do you mean you want infinite bandwidth at no cost?
That's not a very mind-expanding proposition.

------
brentr
(1) No ads

(2) If your markup is not syntactically correct, the browser won't display
your site.

------
TunaFish
Kill, maim and murder the insanity of "be liberal on what you accept and
conservative on what you emit.". Instead, have a standard dtd, and if any site
deviates even a bit from it, render flashing red text on the site that says
"The developer of this site is an incompetent moron. You really shouldn't
trust him or do business with him." Make implementing this feature required
part of every web browser.

