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posted by Editor on Wednesday October 20, @05:17PM
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In a recent on Slashdot thread on the features of a post-HTTP Internet, 0x0d0a offered some projections on the characteristics of a possible next-generation web. They are reposted here with permission:
"The primary addressing mechanism would be content-based addressing (like SHA1 hashes of the content being addressed). We have problems with giving reliable references for things like bibliographies. We are gradually moving in this direction. P2P networks are now largely content-addressed, and bitzi.com provides one of the early centralized databases for content-based addressing. We would have a global trust mechanism, where people can evaluate things and based on how well other people trust their evaluations, those people can take advantage of their evaluations. Right now, web sites have very minimal trust mechanisms (lifetime of domain, short domain names, and the generally-ignored x.509 certificates). This would apply not just to domains, but be more finely-grained and apply to content beneath it."
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The concept of creatable personas would exist. Possibly data privacy laws would end up requiring companies not to associate personas, or perhaps we would just make it extremely difficult to associate such personas. You would maintain different personas which may, if so desired, be separate. Such personas would be persistent, and could be used to evaluate how trustworthy people are -- e.g. if Mr. Torvalds joins a coding forum and makes some comments about OS design, he can simply and securely export his persona (a public key and some other data) from the other locations that he has been using that persona (like LKML etc) and benefit from the reputation that has accrued to that persona. This would eliminate impersonation "this is the *real* Linus Torvalds website", etc. Such trustable, persistent personas would allow for the creation of systems to allow persistent contact information to be provided ('snot that hard). This means no more dead "email addresses".
Domain names not be used as the primary interface mechanism to users for finding and identifying data providers. This is halfway handled already -- most people Google for things like "black sabbath" instead of looking for the official Black Sabbath website by typing out a single term. It's still possible for people to "choose their visual appearance", though, and Visa looks very much like "visa-checking.com", as long as end users have control over how domains are presented to users.
P2P becomes a primary transport mechanism for data -- from an economic standpoint, this means that consumers of data are responsible for subsidizing continued distribution of that content, and shifts the burden from the publisher of the content -- one step removed from consumers funding the production of their content. It solves many of the economic issues associated with data distribution. For this to happen, P2P protocols will have to be strongly abuse-resistant, even if that means a lesser degree of performance or efficiency. Many existing systems have severe flaws -- Kazaa, for instance, allows corrupted data to be spread to users, and conventional eDonkey (sans eMule extensions) does not provide any mechanism to avoid leeching, which destroys the economic benefits. Sadly, one of the few serious attempts to address the stability of the system was also from Bram Cohen of BitTorrent and abandoned -- called Mojo Nation, it used a free-market economic system to determine resource allocation, and was fairly abuse resistent. I have some efforts in this direction, but don't use a free-market model.
Email and instant messaging will merge to a good degree (or perhaps one will largely "take over"). Up until now, it has mostly been technical limitations in existing software that has kept one from supplanting the others -- email provides poor delivery-time guarantees, instant messaging provides message size limitations. Email uses a strictly thread-based model, instant messaging uses a strictly linear model. Probably someone will coin a new, stupid term for the mix of the twain (like "instant mail").
Personas and global trust networks (not extremely limiting binary-style trust, a la PGP/GPG), as mentioned above, will interact with mail. They will be the antispam and anti-joe-job tool of the future, the final fix.
IP will evolve to better deal with QoS. Currently, QoS has largely been a failure on the Internet. However, with the spread of P2P and broadband, we have major bandwidth consumers that could purchase tiered service, where there is non-time-critical delivery (USENET and email were the last time that there was a possible place to slap low-priority flags on a large chunk of Internet bandwidth). It should be possible to pay different rates for high, normal, and low-priority bandwidth (or buy "50MB of high-priority bandwidth/month in the gamer package", etc). We have pretty much only dealt with this for RT-guaranteed delivery, like major providers that are selling VoIP-capable tunnels.
Data addressed by content addressing will allow the association of metadata in a standardized fashion -- in particular, relationships like "derived-from" between two content-addressed pieces of data will be expressable and publishable. I'm working in my spare time on code to implement this.
HTML will finally fail. Ultimately, the move of the general public to the Internet, and the de-emphasis of computer scientists failed to produce a number of people that understand abstract markup, as many had hoped. Instead, there is simply a mass of people that demand to use traditional publishing methods on web-pages, like non-rewrapping and pixel-level layout. HTML was never designed for this, despite extensive work to try to retrofit it for this. I don't think that PDF will necessarily supplant HTML, but I think that something closer to PDF will do so, something that is intended for static layout. It's too bad that most web designers are incapable of designing around content that changes size/shape/layout, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk.
We will finally have a sane RPC mechanism. SOAP is a hack to ram things through HTTP, CORBA is complicated, and sunrpc complicated and ugly. I think one of the most important things that Java did was try to address the problem of distributed systems, and the fact that interfaces to talk across hosts are generally either complicated or a serious pain in the ass to use. Older languages were never designed to natively run on distributed systems. Distributed applications (including commercial ones) will become more common, now that broadband is more common and the industry is more familiar with the idea of providing remote services. Distributed applications, where part of the application lives on the server, can be largely piracy-proof, which gives them a tremendous boost over traditional software in the revenue department. Incidently, distributed apps are also probably not effectively bound by the GPL, since functionality of GPLed software can be provided without distributing source code. A major problem with this has been the lack of micropayments (see below).
Micropayments, or at least more efficient electronic financial transaction systems, will come to the fore. The existing "standard electronic financial transaction system" is the credit card, which is a horrible, easily attacked system, controlled by a few companies, and expensive. PayPal is a partial move in the right direction, eliminating some of the people from the equation. Technically advanced systems (like the use of smartcards, especially those with a keypad and a calculator-style LCD strip on them) can be made that are largely fraud-proof. The only reason that e-cash hasn't caught on yet is because the existing financial services companies are the ones that have backed existing attempts, and demand perks similar to their similar ones. For example, record-keeping and statistical analysis is necessary to avoid credit-card fraud, so credit card vendors have come to enjoy the benefits of having a complete database of people's purchases (and the lucrative marketing possibilities associated with this). It is possible to provide anonymous e-cash systems, but no provider has any interest in doing so -- people don't value this. Credit card companies take a significant chunk of transactions -- about 3%. No e-cash proposal has attempted to take a flat fee, or simply much less. Nobody is going to use a system where someone is steadily taking cuts off the top as the standard mechanism of money interchange (especially person-to-person, where fees are particularly obvious). Such systems, once in place, will allow a number of services that have not previous existed.
The concept of "channels" or "packages" will be applied to commercial websites, in the short term, to deal with the lack of micropayment systems. On TV, nobody wants to deal with paying for a single TV show -- pay-per-view is not the dominant TV paradigm. Instead, they buy packages of channels of many shows, which brings the price up to a quantity that people are comfortable dealing with. If people want to use thirty commercial websites, they aren't going to want to hassle with thirty monthly bills. Plus, there's a marketing benefit -- people can only be *using* one website at once, but by selling "access to *fifty* websites!", it *looks* like a more valuable product to the consumer. I can see, say, "Edutech, Inc" providing an "educational reference package" that sells access to a ton of reference sites. Maybe a parent won't buy service to just britannica.com, but would they buy access to m-w.com, britannica.com, and so forth? Same goes for other sites -- entertainment, B2B transaction, etc.
Packagers add value to service -- it means that domain experts can evaluate products (and drop ones that are becoming problematic or not treating customers well) whereas individual customers are not in a position to get reactions from website developers -- they are, after all, only one person. Use of personas will again be extremely useful -- account maintenance has gotten out of hand, where people reuse passwords and have to hassle with too many passwords and so forth, to the point where it is a significant impediment to commercial websites existing. The "package" approach is not without technical precedent -- various AVS services have done this, and I believe gamespy has set up a similar such service, but they are largely limited by the use of cookies or another password to remember -- an issue which personas would fix. If credit cards are still used in such a scenerio, it means *one* (presumably more reputable) company involved with billing you instead of a horde of tiny websites.
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