Every data packet of information travelling across the internet should be required to contain accurate information regarding its origin and destination. This way, malicious or inaccurate information could be traced and its authors punished.

Certain websites should at least have the possibility to ask for such information like point of origin of any data packet received, and perhaps other relevant information.

Spoofing, on any medium, should naturally be illegal.

Internet connected devices should require the user to set their own password. At the very least such products should not come with preset, default, generic passwords.

The penalty for merely accessing an unauthorized account should be a minimum of $100 per account compromised.

Time Tags

E-mails should specify the time they were sent in both local (sender’s time zone) and receiver’s time zone. The times should be stated in a simple enough format so that it can be read at a glance without giving much effort.

E-mail Charges

There should also be a 5 cent charge for every e-mail that is sent. This would prevent virtually all spam and ensure that the vast majority of advertising that is conducted via e-mail consist of ads targeted to researched recipients. These e-mail fees should be used to help maintain the general reliability and security of the Internet.

Advertising & Spam

E-mail advertisements should always have an ‘Unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of the e-mail. E-mails should be prohibited from having unsubscribe links that appear as URL addresses, or links that say something like “click here” to unsubscribe, or “link”, unless they also have an easy to find link that says “Unsubscribe”.

Furthermore, the recipients of these e-mails should be allowed to remove themselves from a list by either just clicking on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link or by clicking on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link that would then take them to a page where they would be able to unsubscribe simply by clicking an easy-to-find ‘Unsubscribe’ button on that page. They should not be required to type in their e-mail address or even confirm it, nor should they be required to click on or check a box indicating that they want to unsubscribe. They should be required to do nothing else than to click on an ‘Unsubscribe’ button, and this button should be very easy to find and should be visually extremely distinct from a resubscribe button or other button that may not fulfill their desire to unsubscribe.

A request to be removed from an e-mail list should last forever, or should begin three months after the last remnant of a customer initiated contact with the advertiser.

Each Internet advertiser and other users of e-mail lists should be required to update their do-not-send lists every 7 days, at the longest. In addition, they should not be able to sell or give these lists (or any e-mail addresses included in them) to any other entity that may use them for unsolicited e-mailings until after such lists have been updated to reflect all changes made since the last update. In other words, only e-mail lists that have been purged through the latest of these weekly updates would be allowed to be sold or otherwise distributed.

‘Spoofing’ e-mail addresses or any other information should be illegal and heavily penalized.

All magazines, books, newspapers, encyclopedias, and potentially every other commercial publication should be placed on the Internet so that people are not required to physically go and buy a copy of that publication in order to read it. Instead, readers/viewers could be charged a fee for the amount of time they spend reading such materials online. The billing methods should be similar to telephone billing methods where a charge is placed for every viewing based on the rate per unit of time and the length of time spent viewing. Or time could be purchased in blocks of hours or perhaps days. Printing pages being viewed could be made impossible through the use of appropriate software, unless the user purchased that privilege.

Internet web pages should be designed, as much as possible, so that no horizontal scrolling is necessary, unless there is a good reason for it. It is especially annoying when the page is just a little bit larger, either horizontally or vertically, than the screen, and no, or very little, information is present in those off-screen sections. Internet servers should communicate with each computer so that all the necessary information is exchanged to allow for a properly configured webpage to display.

Internet search engines should be allowed, without requiring permission, to copy or reproduce any web content for purposes of search engine indexing, except for content that has been placed behind any kind of barrier, such as a firewall, password-protected content, etc.