The Internet - drowning in its own waste?

[Moldran]

Kandrathe, I really feel I must respond to your post, because some of the things you suggest are exactly the ones that make me very very afraid of the net's future.

Enforceable rules and a worldwide network of Internet enforcement agencies.

This would be the end of freedom, I think this may be the death of the net. The one thing we definately do NOT need is ANYTHING like a worldwide "Internet enforcement agency" (the name sends shivers down my spine).

A new packet protocol that requires encryption, and tightly embeds the packet senders credentials. While I'm an advocate of anonymous speech, I'm a bigger proponent of free speech. Free speech adds the responsibility of the content to the speaker.

I can see where you are coming from, but *please* remember that not everyone who adds content to the net lives in a country that grants as much civil freedoms as your one! In many parts of the world, accountability means the end of free speech.
If you and your communication partner agree to do so, you can already use encryption easily, btw.

What the Internet needs now is accountability of content back to the originator. I want to be able to track spammers and virus authors directly and in order to do that I need to give up being anonymous.

The price is too high, much too high. I definately prefer living with the current amount of spam and viruses over forcing everyone to give up all anonymity.

2] We need a clear physical divide between information and trash.

Why ? Why do we need that ? I think it is fine as it is.
And much more importantly: Who is to decide what is information and what is trash ?

If it is done by IP address, then I would suggest that as a first step the internic adopt a 5th octet IP address standard with the current Internet being zero. Then, I would start to assign the fifth address by information provider category. Or, it could be done by domain name, but in either case someone needs to enforce that there is a difference between the information offerings of a library, or wikipedia and a porn site.

The Chinese government seems to love that idea. I am pretty sure that their definition of what is 'information' and what is 'trash' differs from your one quite alot, though.
Apart from the social implications, I think your idea is also technically unrealistic. If I am not mistaken, you would have to change all network layer routers to be able to route the new protocol. This would take forever. Look at the current state of IPv6 support.

If we can constrain all the adult content a particular physical address, government information to another, commerce organized by industries, university research to others, etc. Then at least each community can be policed using its own community standards or watchdogs

And if government XY does not want its inhabitants to have access to any kind of information that falls into a certain category, all they have to do is block the appropriate address range. Neat.

3] Another obstacle to the Internet being an "Information Superhighway" is copyright. Because there is little control or accountability anyone who publishes anything on the web in effect offers their work to the public domain.

Huh ? Why that ? There is alot of material on the net that definately is very far away from being public domain.

Without worldwide agreements on copyright protection, there will be less of the quality content by professionals and more of the musings of amateurs.

There are worldwide agreements on copyright protection already!
From my experience, alot of the net's quality content is offered by 'amateurs', while 'professionals' tend to be responsible for most of the crap.