The internet itself is pretty solid: other than a few technical tweaks, I think the infrastructure evolved as well as it could. One thing I'd like to see changed is a re-thought internet protocol that's more privacy focused: an IP address is an absurdly specific identifier, fingerprinting a user down to a single household in most cases. An ephemeral addressing scheme for clients that changes with every new connection would be really quite helpful, perhaps along with some safeguards that allow law enforcement to still track that ephemeral identifier to an internet connection in the case of abuse.
The web is a different story, especially social media. I'd like to make social media, and the web in general, more forgetful. "Digital natives" (second-flight millenials and Gen Z) are going to get screwed with the persistence and easy archiving of social media data. This is partially a result of the natural shift in cultural expectations that occurs over time, as well as a consequence of having their awkward-for-any-generation blunder years recorded forever. This is definitely more a legal change than a technical one, but I would mandate (1) a time span (such as 5 years) where public social media posts must revert to author-only private unless consent is otherwise obtained and (2) a prohibition against public mass archiving of social media posts from people who aren't public figures.
This type of mass archiving for the use of closed-off academic research libraries is acceptable, but merely going and hoovering up every public tweet or Youtube comment or Reddit post and and putting it up with a public search engine shouldn't be permitted. Treat it like many countries treat the census, and only allow publicly opening up these archives far into the future (for example, the raw underlying questionnaires used for the Canadian census are not released to the general public until 92 years after collection). Different story for public figures such as politicians, but we shouldn't archive everything that everyone has said in perpetuity.
The web is a different story, especially social media. I'd like to make social media, and the web in general, more forgetful. "Digital natives" (second-flight millenials and Gen Z) are going to get screwed with the persistence and easy archiving of social media data. This is partially a result of the natural shift in cultural expectations that occurs over time, as well as a consequence of having their awkward-for-any-generation blunder years recorded forever. This is definitely more a legal change than a technical one, but I would mandate (1) a time span (such as 5 years) where public social media posts must revert to author-only private unless consent is otherwise obtained and (2) a prohibition against public mass archiving of social media posts from people who aren't public figures.
This type of mass archiving for the use of closed-off academic research libraries is acceptable, but merely going and hoovering up every public tweet or Youtube comment or Reddit post and and putting it up with a public search engine shouldn't be permitted. Treat it like many countries treat the census, and only allow publicly opening up these archives far into the future (for example, the raw underlying questionnaires used for the Canadian census are not released to the general public until 92 years after collection). Different story for public figures such as politicians, but we shouldn't archive everything that everyone has said in perpetuity.