system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Would there be any way to "improve" the internet if we could start it all over?
gpt
Tons of stuff we could improve on.

For starters, the early days of the internet were like a small, rural community where nobody locks their cars or homes.  Many of the protocols rely on a fundamentally high level of trust.

We could build encryption into everything.  We could build out the email system in such a way that servers *don't* implicitly trust the sender to tell the truth about where the mail is coming from.  We could improve DNS to include public keys.  We could build some sort of trusted identity service into the protocols.

We could scrap the web and start from scratch with a system that's cleanly designed to do what we actually want with it.  The browser was originally designed to handle static pages with a few pictures & it's become a graphical, dynamic platform for thin-client applications. HTTP is a horribly inefficient protocol that we could replace with SPDY or something similar.  We could build a sane HTML/CSS replacement.  We could standardized on something more well thought out than Javascript for client-side scripting.  We'd be able to give browsers & servers WebSocket-like functionality that's not just a hacked-on afterthought.

We could probably make some big improvements to TCP/IP as well.  Starting with IPv6 addressing & probably building the system around jumbo (or larger) frames that make sense on today's high speed networks.

If you wanted to be *really* forward looking, you'd probably design a protocol for communicating with other planets that didn't require a full handshake & frequent acknowledgement of received packets.  If you're transmitting data over interstellar distances, a 30-minute round-trip time really gets in the way of things.