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What if URLs were immutable?
What if once content was posted to a URL (maybe a new kind of URL, the immutable IURL)
it could never be changed?
The contents of the site and the URL itself
would be hashed together
and out would come a key that could never be altered.
Not even the theme and styling of the page could be rebranded.
It would be frozen like Han Solo at the end of Empire Strikes Back
Far more important would be issues of identity and freedom. They are related to Facebook's awkward handling of gender and name identities. What if you posted something embarrassing, libelous, or injurious to your professional career?
What if you became a "new person" through a religious transformation, witness protection, or some other kind of powerful ideological repositioning (think conversion to or from ISIS, for example)?
What if you want to become anonymous, or link yourself to a formerly anonymous publication after the fact?
It seems to me that freedom consists not just of being how you wish to be defined, but control over how you wish to be undefined.
You also obviously often want to slightly change the content of say a blog post, fixing typos or factual inaccuracies and such. Tracking down every old link and replacing it with an updated one would be a big undertaking.
There has been lots of work with this concept.
For example, http://trustyuri.net/
Or it can be something like sha256://abc123... where the URI is the hash of the contents. It is infinitely cachable, doesn't require SSL for authenticity (just for privacy), and is location independent (can be hosted anywhere).
I forget how link cycles are resolved, but anyway that's the idea.
I do something similar for http://hashcache.rkeene.org/
This is the core use case of IPFS: https://ipfs.io/
Neocities has just collaborated with Protocol Labs to host their content "permanently" on IPFS.