Seems like the entire networking stack is held together with string and duct tape and unnecessarily complicated.

The more you learn about network technology the more you realize how cobbled together it all is. Old, temporary fixes become permanent standards as new fixes are written on top of them. Apache, which was the most widely used web server for a long time, is literally named that because it was "a patchy" server. It's amazing that any of it works at all. It's even more amazing that it's been developed to the point where people with no technical training can use it.

The open nature of IP is what allows such a varied conglomerate of devices to share information with each other, but it also allows for very haphazard connections. The first modems were just an abuse of the existing voice phone network. The internet is a functional example of building the airplane while you're flying it. We try to revise the standards as we go, but we can't shut the whole thing down and rebuild it from scratch. There are no green fields.

It has always been so. It must be so. It will continue to be so.

(the flexibility of it all is really amazing though - in 2009 phreakmonkey was able to connect a laptop to the internet with a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A acoustic coupler modem and access Wikipedia!)

Some ancient protocols get replaced gradually though. Look at http3 not using TCP anymore. I mean at least it's something.

Wait till you hear about when ipv6 was first introduced (90s) and how 50% of the internet still doesn't work with it.

Businesses don't want to change shit that "works" so you still have stuff like the original KAME project code floating around from the 90s.

I definitely would love to see a rework of the network stack at large but idk how you'd do it without an insane amount of cooperation among tech giants which seems sort of impossible

I may be waaaay off here, but the internet as it exists is pretty much built on DNS, isn't it? I mean, the whole idea of DARPANet back in the 60s and 70s was to build a robust, redundant, and self-healing network to survive nuclear armageddon, and except when humans f it up (intentional or otherwise), it generally does what it says on the tin.

Now, there's arguments to beade about securing the protocol, but to rip and replace the routing protocols, I think you'd have to call it something other than the Internet.

Same unfortunately goes for a big chunk of the law on a global scale.. Constant progress, new possibilities and technologies, changes in general are really outpacing some dusted and constantly abused solutions. Every second goes by and any “somehow still holding” relic is under more pressure. As a species we can have some really great ideas but the long-term planning or future-proofing is still not our strongest suit.