Technology

It is a good idea / a good suggestion.

In general, the existing internet protocols actually work that way -- they were originally designed as a way for networking organizations to connect their networks to one another, for free, because they wanted to talk to one another. You had your internet connection for free through your school / your work / your user group, and TCP/IP connected you via them to everyone else on the internet. The idea only came in much later that one of those "networking organizations" can be a paid ISP that is selling access to the network to anyone who wants to pay them, and it actually wasn't widely seen as a good development when that was introduced, and as years have gone by it's become the dominant model which is a bad thing for many reasons. But the core protocols still don't care and don't require an ISP to be part of the equation. TCP/IP and BGP are good places to start if you want to research more about how it actually works on the peer-to-peer protocol level.

There have been people who've tried to restart the idea of getting internet connections from other motivated / tech savvy individuals, instead of from Comcast. This is a lot more similar to your suggestion idea details. The key word is "mesh networking". A quick search will turn up a bunch of people who are working on it or have set up little networks that work that way. Honestly, to me, it seems a little unlikely that that way can be made to work at any scale for any reasonable amount of effort, at the end-user level. I think probably more what you want is something like community broadband/fiber internet - your local government organizes internet for you at a tiny fraction of the cost that you would have to all collectively pay to Comcast in order to get it done, and we go back to the original model where it's all provided "for free" as a collective, but still centrally organized so it doesn't take technical skill and lots of effort on the part of every single user on the network.

But it's a good idea. Those are just my thoughts to fill in some of the details of how it could happen relative to our current dystopia.

The challenge is the physical layer. The how you send the physical signal is where the cost, the telecoms, and regulation steps in. The rest use what we have. Linux and IP stack.

You could for example become a ham radio operator and IP can be used there but you could only talk to other hams and encryption is not allowed plus other rules.

You could use unregulated band used by wifi routers and build a mesh but the range would be small and there are regulations.

You could lay fiber but you'd have to have access to the utility right of way.

You could setup a WiMax like system or point to point microwave links but you would have to have access to the spectrum to do that which costs money and has regulations.

It goes on and on. The short answer is almost anything is not allowed without money and tons of hoops. That is why we have telecoms and how they protect themselves.

What you just described is roughly exactly how the internet actually does work. There are some additional details as you suggested, to make it usable. But that's the basic foundation.

Like other people have said, this is very similar to how the Internet already works. All you need to do to connect to the Internet is connect to a single router that's a part of it, at least in theory. The Internet is already decentralized on the backend, it's just that only big players get to be a part of it for the most part.

A fundamental problem with your decentralization idea is that on a mesh network, you become reliant on your upstream(s) for your connection. You think Comcast is annoying, or your connection is slow? Imagine trying to troubleshoot your Internet connection and having to go deal with your neighbor instead, but he's at work so you have to wait for him, but oh he's too tired so he'll help you tomorrow...

Not to mention that this severely limits speeds. No longer can your connection go from your house, to the street, to the backbone, and then straight to Google's servers, now it has to go bounce around between a number of potentially unreliable consumer connections, run by non-professionals.

In a system like this, inevitably local organizations or companies will pop up to take the burden off individuals, which would provide massive QoL improvements, and we'd end up with ISPs again.

That said, there's a lot of people doing hobby network stuff out there. I know some hackerspaces have their own local hobbynets, that then connect to each other over the open Internet using VPN tunnels. This solves some of the reliability problem, plus it's just a hobby thing so it isn't a problem that it's slow and kinda bad. Then there are even individuals who get their own routers (or VPSes) and plop them in datacenters to participate in the internet alongside big companies and ISPs. Neither of these require new protocols, everything can be done with TCP/IP and BGP. (Plus a splash of VPN protocols here and there.)

Yeah so you just reinvented a less robust form of IP addressing.

Network infrastructure is hellaciously expensive to build, and absolutely cost prohibitive for individuals. You can’t just drop your own cable from “the internet” to your house and call it a day. You would have to have someone independently managing every switch, router, and cable upstream. That just wouldn’t work.

Your best bet would a distributed wireless network, which people can and have done, especially in cities.

Well, I'm not sure what you make of crypto (or what I make of it) but there was a crypto project that was intended to be a decentralized wireless network. Participants were (are?) incentivized to maintain a wireless repeater of some sort. But the premise sounded semi-plausible to me at the time. I won't name the p[project since I don't know how people feel about crypto, but it's easy enough to search for if you are interested.

It feels like you just described dial up Internet and using IP addresses.

@sarmale feels like FFDN is relevant here:
https://www.ffdn.org/en/