Lumen and Verizon both have subsea cable connections to Europe. EXA Infrastructure is in the process of acquiring Aqua Comms, both of which own subsea cables. Google, MS, and Meta have all invested in subsea infrastructure to varying degrees as well. These are not monopolies in the classic sense of the word but they’re not exactly owned by benevolent interests either.

That said, the point is that a malicious government with sufficient pull, for example the current Trump administration, wouldn’t have to bully very many people to severely limit the flow of information between North America and Europe. So much of the internet depends on US infrastructure that this wouldn’t be terribly far off from censoring the entire internet. In that scenario there isn’t much that can be done about it. Europe can control their own information flow to Asia and Africa but at minimum this would be a severe disruption for a significant amount of time. Other entities might take such an opportunity to impose their own restrictions and make the situation even worse.

They do wade into the IP / transport territory a bit but those are not the 6 companies I was referring to. I was thinking of Verizon / AT&T / Lumen / Zayo / etc.

Except that never happens. They get millions and then go bankrupt some other company.

Your last sentence is spot on but it doesn’t capture the full weight of the impact rich people vibes have on the world. The perceived value of every stock, and by extension the economy as a whole, is almost exclusively a vibe check of rich guys. There is no objective information about a company that is more indicative of that company’s success than how rich people feel about it.

While there are interesting projects in that list, everything that I see is either only useful in a local setting, like wireless mesh networks and their derivative protocols, or assumes that no one is actively restricting what can be transmitted over the privately owned long haul fiber networks that make up the backbone of the internet. How would someone in Seattle transmit more data than can be sent via a ham radio equivalent signal to someone in New York without the use of those fiber networks?

Perhaps you misunderstood my point in your haste to make a complicated problem seem simple but no, my argument has not changed.

No it isn’t. Either traffic is allowed to flow freely or it isn’t. Once you start down the “isn’t” path there’s not much that can be done to get around the fact that a few people control a huge chunk of the infrastructure.

Please explain how you can bypass carrier enforced traffic shaping policy.

From geti2p.net:

I2P’s protocols are efficient on most platforms, including cell phones, and secure for most threat models. However, there are several areas which require further improvement to meet the needs of those facing powerful state-sponsored adversaries, and to meet the threats of continued cryptographic advances and ever-increasing computing power.

The people involved in the project you’re referring to acknowledge that governments can, by influencing carrier policy, disrupt and subvert the project’s intended function. Why then are you implying they are incorrect?

So do a million different forms of encryption. That doesn’t make the infrastructure any less centralized. If the people who own the fiber decide to only allow pre-approved types of traffic to cross their networks then it doesn’t make any difference what sort of protocols exist. Building free cross-country or subsea fiber routes is not economically viable and the internet doesn’t exist without them.

What do you mean by that? Most of the infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.

Some of these facilities do generate a significant portion of their own electricity via various means. It’s not like that amount of energy is just sitting out there on the grid waiting to be used. Somebody has to generate it and if you’re already investing millions in rectifiers, batteries, and other data center power systems, why wouldn’t you consider taking it a step further?

Technically it was invented by Xerox then developed for the military. The 1990s version of the internet was more akin to what you described but I wouldn’t say it was designed with that in mind.

What are you talking about? Things seem to be rapidly deteriorating to me. There are no problems being rectified.

They manufacture a significant portion of the transport hardware that makes up the backbone of the internet. They also just acquired Infinera who had another sizable chunk of that market.

How is a school going to regulate what kids do outside of school property? They could ban cell phones on campus but that’s not going to change what happens after hours.

Funny how that kind of thing only works for rich people

If a small, one time pop-up designed to solve your problem makes you give up on solving your problem then you were never going to solve that problem.

I don’t mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they’ve become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I’m trying to watch and I’ll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.

I’m not against using ads to support websites but it’s the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.