> Most of these proposals would probably make the internet a worse place rather than a better one.
Nice try, Google.
But more seriously:
> Complete anonymity on L3 would result in all tracking being on L7 instead
Good. Then we the users will have more control over it, and outright shut any tracking down. Even using a PiHole might become a thing of the past in this new reality, while also preserving anonymity and being able to pick and choose which traffic is desirable (at the client).
> With complete anonymity, it's all but certain that all of these would need to be gated by account creation to prevent abuse.
"Abuse" is such a nebulous term so as to be nearly meaningless these days. YouTube, Twitch and many others have claimed "abuse" for practically every single thing they don't like. Even today they are trying to shut down downloaders like yt-dlp by trying to obfuscate sources of the videos, adding short-lived tokens for access, and introducing ever more complex JS snippets for the official players to parse and run before being able to stream the video.
> This would actively increase the ability for websites to track you, or else they'd need to be able to somehow handle abuse with exactly 0 information about where any given connection is coming from.
Well, I for one will not weep for at least 80% of today's internet if it got down tomorrow because tracking no longer exist and those "businesses" are no longer solvent and able to sustain themselves.
As for flooding, maybe it should not be their prerogative then. ISPs should handle it. "User X just sent 1 million packets in the last 5 seconds! Shut him down!" and what do you know, suddendly DoS attacks nearly cease to exist overnight. That includes shutting down an entire internet cafe from which somebody decided to play hacker from the movies. Let the internet cafe figure it out. Let them buy a better router or install software that enforces packets per second. This software will quickly get commoditized in this new era and it will be mostly trivially easy to install it.
There are possibilities.
...I'll grant you that DDoS is still a problem though. But with enough encryption and going through several hops it might become impractical -- or at least less practical than it is right now, because these two factors increase your latency towards the attacked target, meaning that the attacked server(s) should absorb the attack(s) easier than before. And, again, individual ISPs should firmly say "NOPE" to any bad actor.
And even if this new routing and encryption get so commoditized that our current levels of DDoS become feasible again, I'll say again and again that ISPs should learn to quickly throttle misbehaving users.
Finally, how do we address malicious state actors owning their own ISPs or even entire peerings between several of them? No idea, but the next-ish ISP in the chain could still severely throttle packets per second if the bad actor ISP starts spamming. But here I am truly not sure if this can actually be solved.
Is anything I said feasible, or even making a lot of sense? Likely not much, granted, but I am not seeing "abuse" as an excuse to last much longer. Git gud, corporations!
Finally, we have so much modern tech that we can start modernizing the internet tomorrow. Of course we can't just swap tech that uses old protocols but putting payloads on top of TCP or UDP is not a problem; part of the desired anonymity guarantees will disappear, sure, but I find it weird how we in general wouldn't take even a partial win.
As long as we're redesigning the entire internet, make it so that a computer can request from its upstream that it no longer receive packets from a source. That upstream can request the same from its upstream and so on. I'm surprised this doesn't already exist honestly.
A sort of blacklist that propagates upstream, progressing thru DNS to final IP ranges. A preponderance of evidence gets a range banned until compliance is evident. Sounds good!
Nice try, Google.
But more seriously:
> Complete anonymity on L3 would result in all tracking being on L7 instead
Good. Then we the users will have more control over it, and outright shut any tracking down. Even using a PiHole might become a thing of the past in this new reality, while also preserving anonymity and being able to pick and choose which traffic is desirable (at the client).
> With complete anonymity, it's all but certain that all of these would need to be gated by account creation to prevent abuse.
"Abuse" is such a nebulous term so as to be nearly meaningless these days. YouTube, Twitch and many others have claimed "abuse" for practically every single thing they don't like. Even today they are trying to shut down downloaders like yt-dlp by trying to obfuscate sources of the videos, adding short-lived tokens for access, and introducing ever more complex JS snippets for the official players to parse and run before being able to stream the video.
> This would actively increase the ability for websites to track you, or else they'd need to be able to somehow handle abuse with exactly 0 information about where any given connection is coming from.
Well, I for one will not weep for at least 80% of today's internet if it got down tomorrow because tracking no longer exist and those "businesses" are no longer solvent and able to sustain themselves.
As for flooding, maybe it should not be their prerogative then. ISPs should handle it. "User X just sent 1 million packets in the last 5 seconds! Shut him down!" and what do you know, suddendly DoS attacks nearly cease to exist overnight. That includes shutting down an entire internet cafe from which somebody decided to play hacker from the movies. Let the internet cafe figure it out. Let them buy a better router or install software that enforces packets per second. This software will quickly get commoditized in this new era and it will be mostly trivially easy to install it.
There are possibilities.
...I'll grant you that DDoS is still a problem though. But with enough encryption and going through several hops it might become impractical -- or at least less practical than it is right now, because these two factors increase your latency towards the attacked target, meaning that the attacked server(s) should absorb the attack(s) easier than before. And, again, individual ISPs should firmly say "NOPE" to any bad actor.
And even if this new routing and encryption get so commoditized that our current levels of DDoS become feasible again, I'll say again and again that ISPs should learn to quickly throttle misbehaving users.
Finally, how do we address malicious state actors owning their own ISPs or even entire peerings between several of them? No idea, but the next-ish ISP in the chain could still severely throttle packets per second if the bad actor ISP starts spamming. But here I am truly not sure if this can actually be solved.
Is anything I said feasible, or even making a lot of sense? Likely not much, granted, but I am not seeing "abuse" as an excuse to last much longer. Git gud, corporations!
Finally, we have so much modern tech that we can start modernizing the internet tomorrow. Of course we can't just swap tech that uses old protocols but putting payloads on top of TCP or UDP is not a problem; part of the desired anonymity guarantees will disappear, sure, but I find it weird how we in general wouldn't take even a partial win.