It would be great if we could replace the whole Internet with modern technology rather than relying on ancient systems like BGP and email.
I've occasionally though of starting a long term project that could eventually do that assuming that politicians screw up things the way it looks like they going to do over the next few decades.
The idea is that a group of interested people would develop these new system with no requirement whatsoever to have backward compatibility or interoperability with the current systems.
Of course these new systems would not get widespread adoption. They'd probably only be used by the developers and a few others who are willing to essentially have two completely different systems in parallel: the new stuff for communications among themselves and the current stuff for everything else. That's fine. It means no pressure to compromise to get something out faster.
Lack of adoption is not a problem. That's where politicians come in. What we are counting on is that those idiots are going to manage to cause or fail to prevent some apocalyptic event(s) that will sufficiently destroy the current systems that when the survivors get around to rebuilding the Internet and communication infrastructure they are starting from a clean slate.
However suggesting that we should change things to eliminate the risk is good. We could eliminate car accidents completely if everyone went over the automatic driven cars that communicated as a mesh network. The Swedish "zero vision" could be achieved, maybe even with todays technology, but it would be a massive undertaking.
Replacing BGP would be a similar massive undertaking. Just switching away from ipv4 to ipv6 has so far taken 20 years and we have no date in sight when we can start deprecating ipv4. From what I have heard/seen, a lot of people are somewhat reluctant to issue backward incompatible replacements of core infrastructure because they look at ipv6 and fear that kind of process. Even seen some pessimistic talks that argue that it is impossible and the only way to achieve changes in core infrastructure is with incremental changes that are fully backward compatible. I am not really of the view but I do understand their fear.
My advice to people is not to abandon email, even if I doubt much people would heed to the warning that email is unsafe for government, business, people and their family. People will risk it regardless. Thus I focus on what may help, imperfect as those may be. In the past that was PGP in the form of enigma mail plugin. Today I am keeping an eye on the new pretty Easy privacy which hopefully can outsource the security to a library that attempts optimistic encryption when ever possible.
