The Internet is in serious need of an upgrade in a number of areas. Some of these problems already have fixes, they're just not being rolled out because it's considered too hard, or there are large vested interests in maintaining the status quo.
This was originally going to be a top ten, but I ran out of writing time during my lunch hour. I may amend the list later.
- Security
Occasionally, we read about the big DDOS attacks on players like Yahoo, or the DNS root servers. We look, see that Yahoo is still up and our domain names still resolve, shrug and go on with life.
Someone as big as Yahoo or a root server can withstand a DDOS. The rest of us aren't that lucky. The current state of the Internet is that anyone with a grudge and sufficient spare time can do serious damage. holding to ransom peoples livelihoods. And you don't even have to do anything wrong. Bob the Warez Kiddie says the wrong thing on IRC, and suddenly his whole ISP is out of action for a month. These things happen all the time.
The Internet is in desperate need of re-architecting so that you aren't under constant threat of having your business or leisure held to ransom by untraceable fourteen-year olds
- The Domain Name System
Before the Internet, there was a system of reserving names called ‘the Trademark’. Perhaps you're familiar with some of them? When the trademark system was put together, it was recognised that due to the severe limitations of language, the scope of trademarks would be pretty narrow. You couldn't trademark common words or phrases, and your trademark only extended as far as your sphere of business.
On the Internet, you can pick any name, and have it held globally by a single entity. There are geographic namespaces, sure, but that's still trying to squeeze too much out of a small language. In the trademark system even holding on to a single name across one country, let alone globally, is generally reserved for only the biggest businesses, who can demonstrate some need to have that word associated with them, and only them.
DNS was a great tool when the Internet was a cooperative system. Now it has grown up into a competitive system, and the domain name system is no longer the right tool. We need to dispose of it, or at least make it largely invisible, and replace it with a more mature directory that doesn't have the shortcomings of its predecessor.
- IP Address Scarcity
They're numbers for Christ's sake. Do you realise how ludicrous it is that the power and flexibility of the Internet is limited because we're running out of numbers? That you have to pay your ISP twice as much for your own number?
- The fixed-price, unlimited access myth
Internet providers are continuing to propagate the myth that flat-rate Internet service is fair. It isn't. Your cost to your provider is directly related to the resources you consume. The 80/20 rule says that the top 20% of users use 80% of resources. (In my network admin days, I also noticed there's a 50/10 rule) This means that the bottom 80% of users are unfairly subsidising the top 20%. It also means that the providers are doing everything they can to limit the top 20%'s ability to do what they want.
On many broadband services you're not allowed to run a server, and your IP address is artificially cycled. Why? What possible difference does it make to an Internet Service Provider if a user is running a webserver or not? Simple. Because they're supporting the fixed price, unlimited access myth, the provider must find ways to cut down on the things users may do that consume bandwidth. Surely, instead of arbitrarily refusing certain legitimate uses of TCP/IP, it would be more logical to make people pay for what they use?
- Drifting away from interoperability
The strengths of the Internet are interoperability, and decentralisation. Look at the biggest thing to hit the Internet since the World Wide Web: Instant Messaging. The four main services, AIM, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger, are all incompatible, and remain so despite the occasional press release saying they might work together some time in the distant future. Where the Internet was built on the idea of creating a network to join together all the disparate closed networks with simple, interoperable protocols, there seems now a move towards trying to corner markets by isolating your users from your competitors.
- Drifting towards centralisation
It's far easier to write a centralised service than architect a distributed one. So that's what everyone is doing. I'll pick on Instant Messaging again, the top four all rely on a central directory controlled by a single company. The trend seems to be away from writing services that get installed at each ISP and join together to form the Internet, towards services that exist on one server out there somewhere, that we hope stays up.
Similarly, there was the promise a few years ago of a distributed caching architecture (via caches like Squid) that would reduce the bandwidth consumed by the web, and thus the cost to webservers. All the current kerfuffle about the inefficiency of RSS would be academic if we had a proper network of caches between us and the end servers. Sure, there were problems with the system, but instead of fixing those problems we seem to have abandoned the idea entirely. Instead, the closest things we get are either the incredibly specialised (and server-pays) Akamai-style edge servers, or when a site is slashdotted, the (once again centralised) Google cache.
- Amero-centricity
Too much of the Internet's infrastructure and organisation is based in the USA. This makes the global Internet too beholden to the political interests of a single country. Sometimes you see the US government getting this “Hey, it was our defence department that started this thing, it's ours!” look, which generally means its time to run and hide.
