Note: This post directly follows my previous post titled "Only you can give birth to a better Internet", which you might want to read for further context!
In my previous post, I talked about my perspective on how we all have our own vision of an ideal Internet, how our visions differ and how multiple Internets can overlap where values are shared between their users.
I wished to not blow the scope of my post out of proportions, so I was brief when I tried to take my own vision as an example. But with this post you're reading right now, I will try to explain it in details, because it feels important to do so.
With this post, I would also like you to think about what your ideal Internet would be like, if you haven't already thought about it. If my post can inspire you, then that would be great!
Legal...ish
Already, I'm gonna let one cat out of the bag: I despise copyright! This is yet another topic that deserves its own post, so I won't get into why that is so, but this fact is important to know for now.
Piracy is something that is extremely important, but it is also illegal, yet illegal things cannot be supported, as that would mean giving a valid reason to be in the crosshair of whatever country or entity allows your servers to run in their territory. You don't want to do illegal things too openly, do you?
To put it simply, it is not yet possible for any Internet to bypass the laws that have been passed on the entire planet. Things that try that succeed for only a time and are ephemeral, and ephemeral things are unreliable, and that's... not great.
Meanwhile, the tools commonly used for piracy, such as but not limited to torrent trackers, VPNs, torrent clients and I2P, are actually legal! However, those tools are under attack by governments, for example the UK is adding restrictions to VPNs, and torrent trackers still feel like they're in a legal gray area.
These tools need to be supported, so that they have the means to fight for their existence in a legal sense. Those tools need to be shared, so that more people (even within governments) realize how important they are.
Similarly, governments are after encrypted chats, yet I believe that encrypted chats are a good thing. What I'm saying is that we (the people) need to stand our ground and do what we can so that the legal things we believe in remain legal, and do our best to convince that the illegal stuff we believe in becomes one day legal.
If for example one day, encrypted chats were to be outlawed, then the best thing to do for the duration that they're illegal would be to teach the people around you about cryptographic software and how they can be used for encrypted emails and the such. As long as the concepts of encryption and data transfer exists, a loophole will exist!
European, as much as possible
Do keep in mind this is from the perspective of someone who lives in the European Union, but I currently believe that for the time being, the legal guarantees offered by its policies such as the GDPR are a viable asset which many other countries in the world do not possess.
In that sense, the Internet I envision should have its users assume that the data they send may never be sent outside that territory unless they explicitly consented to it, for example in the same way YouTube or Steam warns you that you're about to leave their website, though they do it as an anti-fraud measure.
From my understanding, as things currently stand, it is not that websites on overseas servers are exempt from European regulations. However, there isn't much of a guarantee that such websites that violate those regulations won't be protected by the states that host them. Sometimes, it's hard to punish actors from other countries, yet alone becoming aware that they are in violation of something.
So having the peace of mind that you are not accidentally sending your data to other countries could be a good thing. Of course, this doesn't bring a full guarantee that your data will be lawfully treated, but I'd say this improves the odds!
Naturally, my Internet should be designed with that in mind, websites on it should privilege other European websites when it comes to having links, or even iframes, even advertisements. Heck, even images.
Privacy isn't quite the only reason I'd like my Internet to be focused in the European Union. There is also a bit of a political reason for it too, as in, I believe using equals supporting, and that applies to servers and where they are hosted.
Fundamentally, Internets are made of businesses, they are made of servers which are bought and maintained directly or indirectly thanks to the country they are located in, and therefore they themselves contribute to the economy of said country.
Hence, not only does taking such a stance support the economy of the place I live in, it also takes away the support to the economy of states that would have benefited otherwise, states that could be authoritarian, corrupt, really any negative adjective that would make you feel bad about supporting those states in any way.
Advertisements, with a catch
Now, let us first define an advertisement as text or media that has been paid for to exist for a set amount of time by a third party, somewhere owned by a first party.
For the most part, I think advertisements are actually rather harmful to its consumers, they can be distracting especially when they're designed for emotional responses , misleading, straight-up a waste of time especially in videos or on TV, sometimes even inappropriate! Their existence is also a good motivation for the existence of privacy-invasive measures, for targeted ads.
Yet, I think advertisements can have a place on my Internet, just not in the twisted form that we know them nowadays. And don't get me wrong, I do believe the ideal format is ad-free, donation-based, but I don't believe this ideal should be enforced, I don't even believe this ideal can work for all cases.
Let's take the case of a website. Advertisements are obviously useful to website owners as they serve as a source of income, though it is not necessarily one all website owners might want. Advertisements can be useful to users, as they can be pertinent, they can signal the existence of something that can be very useful.
Therefore, if both the owner of said website and the user consent to it, advertisements should be allowed to appear. Whether those ads should be targeted if possible should be up to the user. Whether they can be explicit, of sexual nature for example, should be up to both the user and the website owner. The website owner could decide to only have specific advertisements, too!
However, they mustn't be distracting, and this means they cannot appear next to or in place of or within the content the user has been seeking to get in the first place, as advertisements are inherently designed to catch your attention. There is no going around that, policies regarding the looks of an advertisement cannot fix that problem.
Users can allow advertisements to appear, yet I've just said advertisements basically cannot be allowed to appear. Essentially, that is because I believe there would be abuse, even with the users consenting to advertisements appearing. That's just how it is.
Advertisements need a dedicated place. On a webpage, it could be as an <aside> that could be toggled on, as long as it never defaults to being shown when the page initially loads. On a website, it can be the main content of a page dedicated to them. They really just need to not appear if the user hasn't taken an action that indicates they want to see the advertisements.
By the way, when I said that they mustn't appear in place of or within content, this also includes any mechanisms that allows the user to make advertisements appear. This way, the situation that happens with cookies cannot happen, for example you cannot click on a link to a news article, only for the article's content to be blocked behind a popup telling you to either allow advertisements or to subscribe to their newspaper, or anything like that.
Actually, let's make it even more explicit. Enabling advertisements should never be an action that the user was pressured to do. Navigating or interacting with the website shouldn't be reserved to people who enables advertisements.
Complicated stuff, ain't it? It's really necessary though, this protects users from fake download buttons, time wastes, loopholes such as those that exist with cookies. This also discourages content creators that rely on going in a roundabout way to deliver the content the user wants just so that the user can get exposed to advertisements for longer for the sake of money. They will have to do better content.
Adults first
This topic is a bit sensitive but it needs to be addressed. My Internet should assume that its users are adults by default, and this comes with many implications. Before talking about those, well, what about the children? Should they be allowed on my Internet?
That's something for the legal guardians of the child to decide, not for me. From my perspective, children are merely more vulnerable adults, with the implication that adults are vulnerable to begin with. Almost every individual has phobias, traumas, or even simply something they would not want to be exposed to, including legal stuff.
Something interesting that I see more and more on the general Internet is the existence of "trigger warnings". I think for my vision of the Internet, they would be ideal if they were implemented at a software-level, as they can serve as parental control.
If pornographic websites were to be a part of my Internet, something like the <body> part of its HTML, aka the entire content of the website, would have a specific tag to signal the sexual nature of its content. Similarly, some of its BDSM content would have an additional tag to signal a violent nature. Well, something like that.
Parents would have the responsibility of setting up parental control or something of the likes to disallow certain types of content from appearing in front of their children's eyes. In that case, the websites would merely have the responsibility of properly tagging its content. This applies to all websites.
Let's take music. There's this artist that formerly took the name of "Sewerslvt". Her album "Drowning In The Sewer"'s original artwork (there's a tamer variant) is of a woman with her breasts and cleft of Venus exposed. It should be tagged to signal nudity, at least for the sake of parents who would be uncomfortable with it.
Obviously, I'm not here to talk about the details on how to implement this idea. But this moves the responsibility of protecting the children away from the governments and creators, back to the parents. This should allow for a better experience at least for adult users and content creators.
Subjectivity about how to tag any thing will always be there, but trust me, it's worth it. The other solution is to not allow children at all, but I believe it is an annoying solution for everyone, including the children that will pretend not to be children.
Systems such as age verification should be avoided, but the law does need to be followed when it comes to protecting the children. I would like to avoid gatekeeping this audience away from my Internet, at least its parts that aren't pornographic. It's possible multiple measures being put in place could end up being the best solution. But I cannot allow users of my Internet to be scared of posting sexual content, or even simply nudity, I'd like to avoid compromises there.
My Internet could contain a great wealth of information that can be valuable to adults and children alike! When it comes to sharing that information, I believe it's much better to treat children as adults, rather than adults as children. Let software deal with making my Internet softer to those who need it.
Accessible, reproducible
Unfortunately, things on my Internet are likely to come and go, in the sense that they are not guaranteed to live for a long time. For example, a website could become too expensive to keep running, or an accident/incident resulting in data loss could occur.
To best combat the loss of history and information, I think things should thrive to be reproducible by anyone. This means for example that websites should not only aim to be open-source, but also having regular data dumps that are publicly available.
Should something bad happen to a website, then its community could scramble and figure out what to do with the resources that have been made available until now. The staff of said website should not be the only party to rely on, power needs to be given to the non-staff people just in case.
Things of sensitive nature like private conversations or things that aim to be behind a paywall don't really need to be in such data dumps, or publicly available in any way! This is about preserving historicity and functionality, but some things are worth losing over leaking.
Best kept in mind this is all in addition to standard measures sysadmins should take to prevent bad consequences. If you run a newspaper, your public articles should be in public data dumps, while your paywalled articles should have some sort of private backup. Your public articles should also have some sort private backup.
Note also that if your audience prefers accessing your content (directly or indirectly) through your data dumps than through your website or application, then the data dumps aren't to blame, you are! This plainly means you're doing something wrong, or straight-up hostile, which your audience has to bear when visiting your website or application.
Accessibility could be a reason why. I think at the end of the day, if my Internet is reproducible, then it'll inherently end up being accessible. Users that are blind should not need to use another app to access your content, and you should not avoid having data dumps or the such to avoid the existence of other apps. But at least, if users end up having to use another app for your content, then they can still interact with your content.
Accessible also means a user could easily import or export their data, it can also mean "easy to leave", not a walled garden. If what the user uses becomes questionable, they should know they can switch to what you provide with ease. Vice-versa, they should use what you provide knowing that they're not trapping themselves this way, and can export their data to import it somewhere else.
Simply put, aim to avoid hostility towards both your users and historicity. Care about what would become of the services you provide if you were to pass away, and minimize the risks that things go wrong in all the worst-case scenarios. Things that don't exist anymore are hard to access.
Conclusion
I have spent more than half of my life on the Internet, and right now, it doesn't seem like I will be stopping anytime soon. This left me with some time to reflect on how I envisioned an Internet that I would actually love, rather than the flawed one that I frequent.
Never have I read a manifesto in my life, but it seems apparent to me now that what I've written sorta feels like it would be one. This was not really my intention, but if I intend on making one, then it should go into a lot more details, it should have many more words, it should delve into more topics that I haven't thought of for this post. And this post is my second biggest so far, lol.
It would be fair to say I kinda inhabit the Internet, so I see this post more as a theory on how to make my own environment a healthier, better place for myself and possibly for others, including you, perhaps? Whoever you might be, I would like to read your thoughts on the matter.
How I currently do software engineering does reflect the content of this post a bit, the things I do lack advertisements altogether, all my essential websites are hosted in the European Union, one of which called atlas basically serves as a proxy to access data hosted on services outside of the union, everything I do is open-source, I don't think what I do is quite ideal yet but it's getting there!
Anyway, I want a better Internet, so maybe I'll build it one day. Thanks for reading.