> I think ultimately search and other forms of selective content surfacing should not have ever been exempt. They were never carriers. I appreciate that this would make the web as we know it unusable

I can’t be the only one confused at these calls to have the government destroy things like searching the web, am I?

How is this a real idea being proposed on Hacker News, of all places? Not that long ago it was all about freedom on the Internet and getting angry when the government interfered with our right to speech online, and now there are calls to do drastic measures like make search engines legally untenable to run in the United States?

It’s also confusing that nobody calling for banning things or making the web unusable appears to be making the connection that the internet is global. If we passed laws that forced Google and Bing to shut down because they’re liable for results they index, what do you think the population will do? Shrug their shoulders and give up on the internet? Or go use a search engine from another country?

What we need is quite simply a very good protocol for distributed search. It takes some storage, some bandwidth and some cpu cycles. Have people contribute those and earn queries and indexing. Make it very good but simple enough for a half decent programmer to make a lvl 1 node that can only announce it exists. Trackers, supper nodes, ban lists, ranking algo's etc etc Write server code in all the languages, have phone and desktop clients. There can be subscription based clients too so that the cpu, storage, bandwidth can be done for you by a company.

This description is intentionally vague.