Building the Technology Stack for Internet Freedom (Gigaom)

You make many good points. You point out how a wireless mesh network could not work between too very distant points. Then, unfortunately, you tie this to a highly overloaded conclusion:

> Thus mobile ad-hoc networks always need to be backed up by higher-level, structured networks run by some organization, and at some point (e.g. to cross oceans) they need to rely on wires. Which makes those organizations normal ISPs again.

Yes, likely wires will be needed, but nothing prevents a non-structured mesh of distributed long haul providers from cooperating using mesh like protocols designed to take advantage of wired optimizations, from servicing many of those needs. Distributed control does not have to mean elimination of all large organizations, it just has to eliminate single large organizations controlling things (i.e. monopolies). The only part of the internet controlled by one organization right now is IPs and DNS allocations. And this centralized control isn't even to solve a technical problem such as routing, that is already distributed by many organizations today. But, yes, it would be better to distribute more of the infrastructure, to have more independent ISPs, more independent infrastructure.

As for allocating IPs and DNS, well, there are many things which could potentially replace the current schemes, the work underway on the DNS part is getting some press for sure. But, IPs are even simpler in many ways, because an IP does not have to be human readable, simple schemes such as the way tor allocates onion addresses can be used to distributed this, without requiring a registry like DNS does.

Mesh networking is making a big splash because it is new. But, decentralizing the internet is actually a much simpler problem than solving mesh networking. It's just that to decentralize the internet (IPs and DNS), you would have to abandon some of the old ways of doing things, and people aren't really willing to just do that without a real pressing need to. It's really a bit like moving to IPv6. Perhaps now is the time to do it, before we make that transition, or as a part of that transition? In fact, I suspect that moving to a non centralized IP allocation scheme might even be simpler than moving to IPv6. Why not simply throw the old allocation scheme away when moving to IPv6?

The appeal of mesh networking is mostly that it is new territory, so there is nothing old to abandon/transition, and people can experiment with it easily. It also makes people question the old assumptions that centralized control is needed, so it gets the press (and mind share). Fixing the old, slightly broken existing infrastructure, that get ways less attention. However, I suspect that eventually, the old assumptions will be seen to be flawed, and some headway will be made to clean up the existing infrastructure.