8
Regulatory: Ban advertising.
All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.
You'd need to still have a whitelist, so putting the name of your store on the front of the store or telling a friend about a cool new thing you bought is allowed. But yes.
In a similar vein, letting websites render whatever they can imagine has proven ripe for abuse. Basic HTML is a kind of whitelist of it's own.
The best definition I have come up with so far is to ban 'Party A compensating party B via money, goods, or services for displaying and/or broadcasting media to party C, in particular and/or in general, without party C's specific consent and request.' The only exception might be to allow it for companies that both A. have an annualized revenue less than 10x the median wage, and B. are not making a profit. That would be just to allow small businesses to get the word out at the start but would cut off anything getting to the point where it should be self-sustaining.
Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.
Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.
This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.
I'd stop development of JavaScript.
Now VBScript would have likely become the default for Internet Explorer and would have likely won out.
And Microsoft would be in control of the web
I wonder if Gates would still go along the personality trajectory he's had if he was even more powerful.
IDK how I'd do it, but I'd absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.
Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a "totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold" type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.
Stop IPv6 from existing.
Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.
Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.
Upvoting, not because I necessarily agree but because its a good discussion.
That's interesting - I hadn't heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the "IPv5" way?
oh god, the nightmare that "adding a fifth number" would be
It would be less of a nightmare than changing all our addresses to add four more sets, be alphanumeric, and to change the separator.
The design team flew too close to the sun with that.
The internet would be free, operated and maintained by the postal service.
I'll just go with introducing IPv6 from the very start
This.
Everyone is directly connected to the network.
Everyone can host anything we want. No centralisation.
Trivial peer to peer.
A whole ecosystem of worms infesting every computer.
...
Wait, no, not that last one.
Can I get a ELI5 on why IPv6 is bad or not very good?
ipv4 is a 32-bit number, which means the total number of possible addresses are 2^32^ = 4 294 967 296, which is waaaaay less than the amount of computers we have today. ipv6 is a 128-bit number, so the total is 2^128^ = 340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456, which is more than all the grains of sand on earth.
the only thing i've heard people don't like about ipv6 is that the addresses are longer and have letters in them.
Minor correction: IPv6 uses 128bit addresses.
oops, yeah.
In the context of changing the course of things early on, I'd make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat's already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don't think we can unscramble that egg.
But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we'd have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.
One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.
I'd like to know how things would've turned out if they hadn't made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.
We would have never had all of the money blown on the infra that actually enabled the explosive growth after the dotcom bust. Probably would require a university account to access. And you'd probably be billed for all the bits
It'd still get there, probably; technologies tend to arise over and over again. But much more slowly.
Maybe illegal, small-scale commercial activity would fill the space until they're forced to open it up. Maybe it would develop first in a non-Western nation with lax regulations.
Make it so that security is a priority when developing a standard, protocol, or specification. Even at present, new stuff is developed for functionality first, with security coming in later. IMO they should be developed in tandem, secure by design.
Definitely. Insecure protocols linger on for ages even after we have better options. The internet used to run on unsecured HTTP, FTP, and Telnet, and it took decades for their encrypted successors to make headway and become the default.
I think email is the last major old protocol that's still blatantly terrible, but it's too deeply entrenched/too decentralized to do anything about.
I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it's ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we'd stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can't challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we'll never get to the point where it could replace it.
Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God's transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.
UDP has uses beyond internet and PCs. The embedded world makes extensive use of it.
God it's all hopeless. It's hopeless. I thought the "Reddit/Lemmy users can't detect satire" was mostly a joke but it's all too real
/s was invented for a reason.
We're not dumb, it's just that the internet is so full of incredibly crazy takes nobody can tell.
UDP is for video streams and other applications where a couple of dropped packets do not matter. Triple handshakes are kinda pointless for these types of data transfers.
Every packet is born equal. It is heresy how some people believe that some little packets, born with a certain task, are worth so little that we can just "drop" them. Imagine poor little Bobby packet #93736, on his school field trip, carrying a pixel of your stupid Microsoft teams meeting... but he gets lost in the crowd and left behind by the rest of the class.
Bobby Packet will never see his family again.
"Too much overhead", they said. "It's okay if we lose a few". Billions of little packets are lost daily, forever, all because UDPcels believe in file packet supremacy, and that Bobby Packet "didn't matter".
TCP is proof of a loving God. In a TCP world, the teacher would do a head count... and figure out that Bobby Tables had gone missing. He would shout RETRANSMISSION! He would search ceaselessly just to find Bobby Packet again. And he will.
Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.
Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.
i'd have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
i’d have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.
just fucking get any business major to fund Woz and call it a day. Or spike that prick's LSD before he can do any damage
no, see the important part is to get xerox to be a major player in the graphical minicomputer industry while it was still important, so that the world of guis would all be based on their paradigm with instant editability and deep interconnection.
So.... Kde?
No urls only the IP address and no hyperlinks.
Cookies and browser fingerprinting illegal.
Archival of all web pages. (Some exceptions such as takedown of CP or revenge porn).
What's the point of no hyperlinks? Now you just copy-paste the address into your browser instead
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
8 points (100.0% liked)
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