We now propose the creation of the IWN, that is, the International Website Number.
The IWN would serve many purposes. One of them is guaranteeing that our scientific articles be accepted by a larger number of journals when containing several references to websites.
Another is guaranteeing largest amount of chance for communication and rights: A few websites we have used in a scientific article in the past have all been deleted from the Internet. With the IWN, we would guarantee that those websites, as presented to us by the time we write our article, are kept somewhere accessible.
We should have the same processes we have for the ISSN and the ISBN adding only a bit extra: Each and every time a website is updated, the owner has to pay a symbolic fee, say AU$ 0.20, to be allowed to update it, since the IWN is assigned for life to the website.
The IWN of our first website was, for instance, 678888888. Now we want to update it for the first time. We then ask permission to the central of the IWN, which is obviously online, to update it by paying the fee with our credit card (and we then only allow this method of payment) and submitting the updated contents to their records.
When the credit is verified from their end, the system automatically assigns the IWN 678888888U0001 to that website, so that everyone will know that this is the first update of the website.
All versions of all websites get to be stored also electronically, the storage being distributed to several parts of the world, so that we can always ask to see that particular version of the website. With this, we could, from that moment onward, mention the website in our paper by means of its IWN, because that will provide all researchers with a safe key to hang on to.
This will guarantee that criminal evidence, ALSO in the case of violation of human rights, is stored properly and in a way that the entire human kind can come back to it at any time.
We know that human right cases cross many years without being dealt with. This would be of huge help therefore.
To give a good example, we had at least three websites in 2001 that mentioned cases of ex-CIA agents who claimed to have been victims of the CIA bug. Some of them contained very helpful copies of the X-rays of those involved, copies that made us believe they were bugged straight away.
Those websites have now all disappeared.
If we had the IWN system in place back then, however, we could go online, to the IWN authority's site, and request a copy of that particular website.
We then make the browsers only accept navigating through registered websites to make things better.
We make people pay only to update the website, not to register it for the first time. This being because the Internet has to be kept as the safest and quickest means of communicating with others.
This would actually solve a lot of problems with hacking: If people hack a website and modify it, then the modification will not be accepted unless they provide the thumb's print of the person who created it (we then suggest that computers come with a little rectangular scanner-pad to capture fingerprints). We can then at least track crime better if not succeeding in stopping this sort of crime immediately.
We also make it mandatory that the website be exhibited with the IWN always, so that everyone can refer to any website at any time.
This will also finish with illegal websites, say pornographic and criminal ones.
As another point, we could make censorship of sites even more flexible, since now people could use the codes to stop websites from circulating.
We witnessed a fellow academic accessing porn movies during work hours at a famous university in Melbourne in 2002. This sort of abuse could be stopped by having the IWN authority imposing some restrictions to the codes that refer to pornographic material, say they all have a PO somewhere.
As another point, there are several fishing websites nowadays. Those would also be stopped, since now they could be made legally liable quite easily.
Besides all the advantages we have already mentioned, comes the extraordinary amount of new jobs that will be generated because of the new system.