Oddbean

The real question is why would you want an ISP. Pointing a radio antenna or dish would make way more sense in most cases. Even when it wouldn't (urban centers) running wire is infrasructure not a corporate duty.

I meant in the start over scenario. The cabling construction make it ownable instead of a "tap into a band of frequency" type model. In that world, (RNS sort of already does this) you would not have an ISP and infrustructure would be local but connected to a global network like BTC Nodes or Nostr relays.

Well the reason why the hard assets are corporate owned is because those entities mastered the most efficient method of infrastructure build, they don’t own it for no reason. The locales had a need, the corporations would compete for contracts based off the lowest cost and highest efficiency. Maintenance DID become an issue, as it always does. In regards to the spectrum licenses and rights, yes, there’s a lot of thought to be had there. Same with air rights (the space above your property). The federal government will usually tilt towards what’s “best” for the masses (or the ultra-wealthy), & it can be a hard fight in the states, where such a huge space is subject to the same federal governance for efficiency and communal-sharing purposes.

This is difficult to articulate in text but I will give it one more shot. The presupposition is that there exists such a thing as "public land." There is no such thing. All land is owned. "Public land" so called, is owned(stolen) by the state. Infrastructure is property that adjoins land owned by two or more parties. (Utilities, roads, and street lights) The proposal here is using a mesh-type system where your node is a data propagator as well as a send/receiver. Utilizing either a hard-wired mesh (likely to a high bandwidth local propagation node) or a radio (lower bandwidth self-hosted propagation node). This makes the internet as fast as the fewest hops between you an your local website's closest host server farm. Any break in the mesh would be routed around but through I2P and RNS it is end-to-end encrypted web traffic with blind intermediaries. This is currently a possiblity you would only like be using an ISP's infrastructure without their knowledge which could eventually be found and blocked. Anyway the point is there are self-sovereign solutions but the take time and knowledge that people are wasting serving the state.

I appreciate this. I’ll bookmark it and give it some thought. I’m not a telecom technical specialist, but will pass the notes on for discussion. At the end of the day, specialization matters, but I’m not sure the scale of the entire USA is the best way to apply centralized solutions, so I agree with you on that.