You cannot solve social problems using technical solutions.
Someone would simply build a bridge and siphon data out or in. Interoperability is one of those low-hanging fruits that, once solved, ruins its value.
No TCP/IP means no normal internet routing. → You would need a totally new way for machines to find and send data to each other.
Bots are not tied to HTTP/HTML forever, people can write new bots for the new protocol, including by the use of GUI automation (digital or with plotters that mimic human actions (instagam farm bots))
Yes there's technical challenges, but the current iteration of the clearnet is on life support from a humanistic perspective.
And, projects of similar conceptual scope already been accomplished. There exists more than one application layer network built on top of the current Internet.
If you want to criticize the idea I encourage you to; but please don't just shoot down and insult on hn.
They just did. That isn't "just" shooting down.
More than making the new stack non-interoperable with existing tech, you would have to make it non-interoperable with existing money. And then you're talking an even bigger revolution than a new internet.
There's a kernel of interesting ideas here, but I don't think it pays due enough attention to the rotting of the internet being a socioeconomic problem (feature?) first.
Why? Just eliminate surveillance.. no tracking is no money. There's another theory that maybe no money is no content, but that's sort of what tfa (and other stuff on HN lately) is actually talking about. Lots of people who would make content or just conversation for free are still relying on some sense of community which is under attack everywhere if not already destroyed. Community means organic discovery, organic participation, and some reasonable expectation of continuity / non-enshittification that's actually independent of corporate interests or sponsorship.
Seems easy in the way that a lot of things are easy, and this definitely isn't about making everyone and everything untraceable.
We don't really need to play ads at 15% extra volume from content. GDPR didn't mean that every website has to do the passive-aggressive "Just following the rules here, click this so I will leave you alone" popup. Facebook could track users and sell ads without eagerly getting involved in things like election interference. Gas stations and airplanes could enjoy the good thing they've got going without pushing ads at captive audiences, increasing their margins some tiny percent of a percent while increasing friction and misery a lot more than that. A lot of this stuff is like arson, or stealing clothes that don't fit.. often the bad guy barely profits so it just seems pretty self-destructive and crazy.
I'm no idealist and I take for granted that greed and evil is going to happen, but I think most people can see that we need to pump the brakes. No-limits enshittification just blows up everything in the long term, including profit margins. Why the board and shareholders always tolerate this stuff from the person temporarily in the executive office is mystifying.
That’s a lot easier said than done.
This isn’t the answer though. It’s not technically feasible and doesn’t actually address the problem.
Your falling into the classic software brain trap of thinking the solution to a social problem is a technical one, when that isn’t necessarily the case.
Perhaps a HTTP browser that only `Accept`s `text/markdown` might be interesting but replacing IP is right out for me to participate in, at least.
To escape everything that makes the internet garbage now, I've come to the conclusion we need gated digital communities kept free of anything other than donation-based monetisation.
How can a non cool clueless child of the 80's join these secret clubs?
Seems to me like OP is trying to work around dns
Edit: found it, it was TARPN https://tarpn.net/t/packet_radio_networking.html
What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.
Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.
The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.
We already had that, it was called crypto mining. Profit motive has taken care of that already
The network is vast, but only some nodes are valuable.
Since you have nerd sniped me, I will take a riff at what the principles should be (feel free to disagree):
1. The internet should be centered on devices we own. It runs on our devices, data is stored on our devices. For god’s sake, you can get a 20TB drive now for $500.
2. The internet should be local-first too. The normal order of operations should mean that things are local such that they work offline too by default.
3. The internet should be private. What we view shouldn’t be trackable. I think some of this falls out of 1 and 2, but something something like Tor for the rest.
I think this aligns with the principles of local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/ largely, with a twist of content addressed storage for bulk static content exchange (so more Git than CRDTs).
But there's lots of good stuff on the Internet that isn't the web or web-adjacent.
