I firmly agree that the free and open internet is in a slow state of decline. The speed at which people are willing to accept that decline without even realizi

I firmly agree that the free and open internet is in a slow state of decline. The speed at which people are willing to accept that decline without even realizing it’s happening is pretty staggering, and certainly not the responsibility of one person to fix. I’m wondering though if maybe the community can remedy that by bolstering the techniques that are still good. Off the top of my head: * Eliminate the notion of a second class netizen: WebRTC, STUN etc to overcome the mistake of NAT (which still exists in IPv6) * Separate content from source: distributed hash table (DHT) in place of subresource integrity (SRI) * Encryption everywhere: letsencrypt.org and other providers, with fast start (begin sending encrypted data before full handshake to eliminate startup delay) * Trust networks that can be trusted to work: Diaspora, possibly others (I am the least familiar with this aspect of P2P networks) * Nearly free backbone: cell phone hotspots and rooftop boxes that can run a meshnet at full bandwidth, using existing DHT and CDN concepts to cache data blocks locally I’ve written these from easiest to hardest to the best of my ability. Maybe part of the reason the web is failing is that its fundamental software and hardware were created under assumptions that cater more to system administration or the profit motive than they do to full self-actualization of the user. Few of these infrastructure improvements will come from the corporate sector, but they’re needed as a foundation for a real web 2.0 that isn’t a walled garden.