Superweb is the Internet we always wanted.
No cookie banners. No annoying GDPR prompts. They’re all auto-clicked based on your preference.
No ads. Even on mobile. When I scroll Instagram, there are zero ads displayed. Alternately, if one wanted to support ad-driven models, Superweb would convert them to a sensible format. All ads now look like they do on Daring Fireball. Like a flyer at library. Pleasant. Informational.
Universal subscription for all news. You pay once and access them all. Fractional payments are deposited in the accounts of publishers (NYT, FT, etc) should they ever want to claim it, based on pageviews.
All apps are extensible. Suppose I wanted to reconfigure WhatsApp, Signal, or any closed ecosystem app to do something extra. With Superweb, everything has a REST API I can work with. Like IMAP.
Latency increases late at night. In order to nudge you to go to sleep. Internet speed is dosed like cortisol, high in the morning and low in the evening.
Ambient presence for close friends. See what your friends browse amongst a whitelist of certain sites (e.g. Netflix, Wikipedia, etc). If you want to. It’s a true form of intimacy – like Find My Friends, but for the web. This is displayed on an actual map: I can see the friends in Wikipedialand, the friends in Hululand, etc.
It works on all platforms. iOS, OS X, Linux, Windows, even Xbox.
How
It’s a VPN. It’s hosted on the device; no traffic leaves your iPhone to some weird server. It uses a self-signed SSL certificate to inspect your own traffic, and make modifications to it.
A JS file for each app. Similar to how PAC files work, but slightly more complex. For example, whatsapp.js might be responsible for turning the WhatsApp API into something more pleasant to use.
A JS file for each feature. ads.js relies on instagram.js, pinterest.js, etc. and RESTfully intercepts traffic to rewrite ads.
It’s all open source. When WhatsApp changes its API, any of the 40 million users on Github can contribute to fix it.
What Next?
This is just an idea. If executed well, it could become the bedrock of the next Internet. I’d be curious if others are excited about this as well.Also, what would be other neat feature bundles, like what’s described above? Let me know! @danielgross or just email me, address is below. Or Pioneer, link is below.