How to Improve the Internet
How would you improve the Internet?
1) InterNIC (one of the governing boards for the Internet) should create a few hundred new first level domain names. (First level domain names are the domain name to the right of the dot in an e-mail address, such as .com, .edu or .org.) Each of these new names would be used for specific purposes. There would be a .law domain name to be used exclusively by lawyers. The law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, for example, would use Cravath. Law, not Cravath.Com, thus not tying up a name in .com (which is by far the most crowded of the first level domain names). Each of the professions would have a separate domain name — .acct for accountants, .md for physicians, .eng for engineers, etc.
There would be a .movie domain name for movies. Currently most new motion pictures have a Web site. Currently, “Cold Mountain” might have something like “ColdMountaintheMovie.Com” or even worse, www.Sony.Com/coldmountain. Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply have www.ColdMountain.Movie? TV stations would use .tv, radio stations .radio, newspapers .newspaper, cultural organizations .cult, restaurants .rest, etc.
2) There ought to be an easy way for everyone to have a lifetime e-mail address. Assume you have a friend Lisa Smith, whom you met in high school. She goes to college, then to graduate school, and then works for ten different companies in his career, and then when she retires she has yet another e-mail address. This would mean 14 different e-mail addresses for Lisa throughout her life, which is a pain to keep track of.
Right now, there are a couple of ways for Lisa to handle this. She could use a portal such as Hotmail or Yahoo. The problem, of course, is that she is stuck with, say, Hotmail unless she wants to notify every one of her new e-mail address. And Hotmail and the other portals have severe storage constraints.
If she was technologically sophisticated, she could get her own second level domain name. A friend of mine, Brad Feld, acquired
In 1994, and he’s been using it ever since. He’ll have one e-mail address his entire life. Most people don’t do this, however, and there is some cost to do so — Brad pays about $50 a year to a registry for the Feld.Com domain name and another $50 a year to his ISP for maintaining the domain name.
My solution would be to assign an unique e-mail number to every American who is alive, and to every American as they are born. It would be like a social security number but it would be a different number than one’s SSN. Assume that the number assigned to me was 109-298-398. Each ISP would have a directory (like the domain name server that translates domain names into physical IP addresses) containing all of the e-mail numbers that have a e-mail address assigned to them. My e-mail address is jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com, for example, so this directory would know that 109-298-398 should be sent to jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com. If you wanted to send me an e-mail, in the To: field you would type #109-298-398. Your ISP’s e-mail server would then look that number up in the directory and then know to send it to jmitchell@kensingtonllc.com. For the rest of my life, I would only have to give out one number and if you wanted to keep in touch with me throughout your life, you would only have one number to keep track of. As I changed e-mail addresses (not e-mail numbers), I would simply let the directory know that my e-mail address had changed. You would not need to know about this change because you would continue to use my e-mail number, which you could use forever.
A variation on this would also make it easier to remember what to type in. Assume the U.S Government does a survey of common names and concludes that even the most popular names have no more than 10,000 of them — i.e., there are no more than 10,000 John Smiths in the world. Thus, one of the John Smiths could have e-mail sent as #John_Smith_09871, which presumably is a bit easier to remember than 109-298-398.
(Some schools offer a similar service such as this. Students at Harvard Business School, for example, are assigned a life-time e-mail address. If Alexandra Jones is entering the MBA class of 2007, she is assigned AJones@MBA2007.HBS.Edu, which she can use the rest of her life if she lets HBS know which e-mail address e-mails should be forwarded to.)
3) Each document available on the Internet should be assigned an unique number which can then be easily located. Assume Paul Smith is a professor of materials science at the University of Southern California, and he has published 10 articles in his career, which he has put on the Internet. The School of Engineering has offered him a Web page. If you want to read his first research paper, you might type in this URL :
www.USC.edu/engineering/smith_paul/article_01
Various documents that cite Smith’s first document would then list this URL.
The problem is what happens if Smith moves to Northwestern University? All of those URLs that cite how to get to Smith’s article are now incorrect.
My solution is to have an international directory of documents; each document would be assigned an unique number. This directory would then keep track of these numbers and their associated URL. Assume that Smith’s research paper I is assigned the document number 1098-2987-2987. If you wanted to read that paper, you would type into your Web browser DN#1098-2987-2987. Your Web browser would then query the document database and find the correct URL. When Smith left USC and moved to Northwestern, each of his research papers would now have a new URL. He would update the directory with these new URLs. The document numbers would stay the same, however, and you would always be able to find his research papers.
What an document would be would be broadly defined. Every article in every periodical that publishes on the Web would be assigned an unique number. Every essay, working paper, white paper, etc. would be assigned an unique number. In addition, one might want to have the ability to have version numbers, since people often have drafts of documents on the Web. Assuming that no document needed more than 10,000 versions, the 16th draft of Smith’s research paper would have 1098-2987-2987.0016 as its document number.
Read James’ essay On Spam.
List of other essays written by James Mitchell | Copyright notice
Cite as “How to Improve the Internet??? by James Mitchell. February 8, 2004, version 1.6
www.jmitchell.me/essays/improve-internet.