If you could go back in time, what is the one thing you would change about computers or the internet?

Full documentation and second sourcing of all hardware.

This restores the right of ownership and destroys the current dystopian nightmare world of lost citizenship and democracy. It is closely tied to google winning the right to digital slavery and the buying and selling of your digital person to exploit and manipulate you.

Regulatory: Ban advertising.

All of the worst elements of the internet are ad supported. There would be no downside.

I'd like to know how things would've turned out if they hadn't made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.

Erase Facebook/most social media from the collective consciousness and go back to forums.

Stop IPv6 from existing.

Make IPv5, add a fifth number to the address, and improve NAT.

Not every particle in the universe needs a publicly routable address.

I'd stop development of JavaScript.

One? Tie between redoing CFAA, DMCA, and privacy regulations before they became problems.

Make it so that security is a priority when developing a standard, protocol, or specification. Even at present, new stuff is developed for functionality first, with security coming in later. IMO they should be developed in tandem, secure by design.

I would make the default home router ip a human recognizable number like 123456 or something.

I would make it so complex software has an accessible console for commands and readouts/logs of previous commands like AutoCAD.

I would make it so mouse driven UIs were designed from the bottom up to be tightly integrate with command line views. This would make tutorials, learning and utilization of commands so much more efficient.

I also would make it so every UI element/window/toolbar of complex software had a specific ID number you could use to put into a search engine, search documentation or ask for help with.

I think web 2.0 (ie. the internet after standards bodies had congealed around the browser stack of tech) would have been better off as a complete redesign. Sure we made SPAs work on top of the hodge-podge of shit that is HTML/CSS/JS, but at what cost? Before React and it's ilk, there were many attempts to bring desktop GUI-like toolkits to the web which imo was a superior paradigm. Now, a browser is basically a shitty VM with horrible abstractions for web applications. If only we'd stopped and rethought that. WASM was also a chance for that to happen, but 1.0 is so limited (can't challenge the browser too much! it makes google money!). And the fractured WASI nonsense that exists now means we'll never get to the point where it could replace it.

Nothing, i'd just buy all the GPUs and mine all the bitcoin.

But more seriously, if I had somehow the power to make hardware open, I would.

Prevent MS from forcing their docs xml standard on us all.

I'll just go with introducing IPv6 from the very start

Hard to say, but we needed to leave a minimum level of a learning curve to using any computer, not a PHD required, but enough to bore the red hats. As soon as Apple's toddlerfication of smashing BIG, bright, colorful, soft shapes made it so everyone in the world could gold the history of humanity's knowledge in their pocket... They started confusing their pocket with their brains. Holding knowledge doesn't mean HAVING knowledge.

The instant and infinite false confidence that magic slab gives hateful idiots was our downfall as a species.

i'd have blocked steve jobs from visiting xerox PARC.

This one will be super controversial, but I'd say get rid of mobile internet. I think it was a huge turning point for society, and not in a good way.

It's tough because it actually does a lot of really good, useful things. But it also has a ton of negative effects. We seemed to do ok before it, and cell phones would still function as phones for calls and texting.

Ban UDP. Illegalize the formation of UDP. I hate UDP. TCP is God's transport layer protocol. Everything successful uses TCP. Minecraft, best selling game in the world? Guess what, TCP. UDP fans will really send their packet into the void praying for a response that will never arrive, for their packet was completely ignored by the receiver and will never see the light of day again until a stupid 60 second timeout. I Refuse to use udp. DNS? tcp only. HTTP/3 is disabled everywhere, as QUIC is an unholy bastard born from the wrath of UDP and the comparably great TCP. Even my VPN over wire guard (mullvad) uses the UDP over TCP bridge so that I am not required to come into physical contact with the hell that is UDP. I hate the stupid uncancellable timeouts that every software waits a full minute for, even though I know the request has failed. Everything that has failed uses UDP.

The internet would be free, operated and maintained by the postal service.

I'm not really that smart when it comes to protocols but I would go to Stanford University and guard the IT cabinet and tell Aaron Schwarz to stay the fuck out and go do something else.

IDK how I'd do it, but I'd absolutely try to find a way to ensure Amiga wins out compared to windows worldwide.

Either that, or, if legal, making a very vague patent/trademark/whatever on things like tracking pixels/cookies and implementing them on a dummy site for a "totally not a patent/trademark/whatever hold" type site to at least ensure privacy is at least a little better for the average person not using chrome, edge, Firefox, etcetera.

Forums and YouTube remain the main forms of social media. No Facebook or anything of the like.

Here's an esoteric one: Kill the internet (as we know it) before it begins.

Okay, hear me out. Internetworking existed before HTTP and websites, and once the system of routing was there it was inevitable it would be used for all the things it is today. Email came first, and what is the Fediverse but an automated, abstracted-from-the-user email system?

With no HTTP, somebody comes up with the idea of an application that formats your mailing lists into one navigable page, and then somebody else starts caching mailing list emails at the server until requested by a user (like an instance). SMTP directly transitions into ActivityPub, and there's no need to build platforms overtop which can be monopolised. We might get to skip the Zuckerbergs and surveillance capitalism entirely.

Publish Piefed before Lemmy ever existed to minimize the tankie influence

Making email free was a mistake. Makes sense to encourage early adoption but long term it's been a no-lose proposition for spammers, phishing, and general aggressive marketing.

In the context of changing the course of things early on, I'd make everyone post under their real name in any context. To be clear, I DO NOT support that today. The cat's already out of the bag and pseudonymous communities are the norm now, I don't think we can unscramble that egg.

But if somehow, from day one, you needed to attach your own name to everything posted online, I feel like we'd have ended up with a less toxic internet than we have in many places today.

I'd make the internet automatically fact check everything

No urls only the IP address and no hyperlinks.

Cookies and browser fingerprinting illegal.

Archival of all web pages. (Some exceptions such as takedown of CP or revenge porn).

There's a hybrid BBC / Commodore 8-bit computer I'd like to have seen, for sure.

Gopher.

Or Gemini (protocol, not AI). No fancy rendering, you get plain text.

European computer builders joining MSX and expanding it to 16 and 32 bits.

Hmmm, I got a few ideas, not necessarily to make a "better now".

One is for Unix's initial development to only begin in the mid 1980s, instead of the 1970s, which would hopefully result in some of its more obnoxious "features" not existing. rm -rf / - No asking for confirmation, because that will certainly not have any undesired consequences! The main downside is that we wouldn't have the Unix-Haters Handbook

Another is making RISC style CPUs the default for desktop computers, whether the originals by Acorn or even with Intel deciding to make their own ARM x86 series all the way back in the 80s. I'd pick this one.

Make it harder. Remove the gui. Require UNIX knowledge. Command line only.

Keep the mouth breathers out.

Given the ability, I'd get rid of the Internet completely.