IPv6 gets mentioned plenty, and I will take the side that it should have been rolled out WAY sooner than it did, and it should have been rolled out in a way that made it easier to do what I call the Apple Method: Just get it out there and the people will adapt to it.
DNS is a horrid mess that should have been designed with ease of reading in mind. And I know that DNS was designed way before it, but I think a data transit format similar to JSON would have made the system a bit more extendable, and given people a chance to make it a more dynamic system.
E-Mail was brilliant in it's time, but for the love of all things explosive and holy is it bad. Just the fact that in it's base design there is no E2E encryption going on is a problem.
My biggest beef with the current internet is HTTP. Everything is built on it, and it isn't the greatest system. There have been so many systems and protocols implemented that did so many things, FTP/gopher/irc/etc, and most of them have gone the way of the dodo. A few hold-outs in the dedicated tech world will still use irc, but we could have done so much with cloud-based systems with FTP. And if we had a new spec for irc, would we need Slack/Discord/MS Teams/etc? They could then all talk to each other. We shouldn't be trying to reinvent the wheel, we should be using these older services in our platforms.
And don't get me thinking about cloud. The worst term that a marketing team got a hold of. At it's core, it's just somebody else's computer. And again, so much of it is build on HTTP protocols. Not many people know or remember that xWindows and X for *nix systems had a distributed system built in. Log into a server, set one environment variable to your IP address as long as you were running one of these systems yourself, and you could runs programs on the server with the GUI on your computer.
> And if we had a new spec for irc, would we need Slack/Discord/MS Teams/etc? They could then all talk to each other. We shouldn't be trying to reinvent the wheel, we should be using these older services in our platforms.
The reason we have all those separate systems is not that there are no alternatives: irc could have evolved with a new spec, but there is also XMPP (Jabber)... The reason is that all those systems like Slack/Discord/MS Teams do not interoperate with each other is that they are developed by companies that need to make money, and they want to force and keep users on their systems.
I think email is the only communication protocol that is still very popular and works across providers. I don't think it will disappear anytime soon. At this point, email providers cannot lock their users into their own system: no one can imagine that you'd be only able to email other gmail accounts from a gmail account or other microsoft accounts from a microsoft account.
This touches on what I think is really wrong with internet innovation.
We haven’t adopted a new wide spread protocol since the early 2000s because all big tech wants to silo their user base or make a protocol that gives them a massive first mover advantage(AMP, RCS).
this is mostly an artifact of how most firewalls are configured to only allow "neccesary" stuff; this also applies to ipv6 and hence all dreams of it re-enabling end-to-end connectivity are kinda moot.
DNS is a horrid mess that should have been designed with ease of reading in mind. And I know that DNS was designed way before it, but I think a data transit format similar to JSON would have made the system a bit more extendable, and given people a chance to make it a more dynamic system.
E-Mail was brilliant in it's time, but for the love of all things explosive and holy is it bad. Just the fact that in it's base design there is no E2E encryption going on is a problem.
My biggest beef with the current internet is HTTP. Everything is built on it, and it isn't the greatest system. There have been so many systems and protocols implemented that did so many things, FTP/gopher/irc/etc, and most of them have gone the way of the dodo. A few hold-outs in the dedicated tech world will still use irc, but we could have done so much with cloud-based systems with FTP. And if we had a new spec for irc, would we need Slack/Discord/MS Teams/etc? They could then all talk to each other. We shouldn't be trying to reinvent the wheel, we should be using these older services in our platforms.
And don't get me thinking about cloud. The worst term that a marketing team got a hold of. At it's core, it's just somebody else's computer. And again, so much of it is build on HTTP protocols. Not many people know or remember that xWindows and X for *nix systems had a distributed system built in. Log into a server, set one environment variable to your IP address as long as you were running one of these systems yourself, and you could runs programs on the server with the GUI on your computer.