Net Neutrality means paying users subsidize free loaders with government enforcement under the idealistic guise (lie) of "making all packets free(dom) or equal". Since everyone then is motivated to be a free loader, then the internet goes bankrupt and is backstopped by government subsidies. This is just socialism (not trusting the fine grained annealing of the free market), handing control to the largest multi-nationals which have regulatory capture of the government, and thus abject failure end game.
It is not surprising to me that most people these days fall for this bullshit. People are so socialist and collectivist minded these days. They believe the problem is the solution, i.e. the problem of multinational regulatory capture of the government is solved by more government regulation. Sigh.
Any way, I've been thinking about how we can get improved IP obfuscation anonymity on the low-latency internet without relying solely on low-latency Chaum mix-nets such as I2P and Tor. The solution can also work around Net Neutrality socialism.
Once we have a micro-payments decentralized crypto-currency (Bitcoin doesn't have the correct design), we can design turnkey software so that any one can turn their home WiFi router into a money making ISP. Drive-by clients can anonymously pay per packet to connect over the WiFi.
As these WiFi nodes become ubiquitous (due to their independent setup and profitability), they can begin to connect to each other in a mesh topology network, thus by passing (routing around) the internet backbone in case where the government has put in a packet filter.
Fuck the socialism! We hackers are in the process of radically changing this world. Stay tuned...
I think Net Neutrality is a necessary evil in a terrible, centralized market created by government. While the idea of a mesh-net is great for dense areas, I still don't even have a broadband ISP option. There's not even DSL here and current 2.4GHz routers aren't going to bring it. I bought a fancy Ubiquiti antenna and router to see how far it can penetrate, and except PtP with LoS, it's only a marginal improvement over a $20 wireless Linksys router - because it's using the 2.4GHz bands. I'd be overjoyed to see a Meshernet, but I doubt that's going to happen for me within the next couple of years, whereas net neutrality can protect me from ISP blacklisting or even (God forbid) whitelisting, as well as fast lanes (and I see no reason to trust ISPs are going to throttle based on consumption vs. arbitrary "we don't like p2p tech like BitTorrent or Bitcoin") - because many ISPs ALREADY throttle based on consumption, right? When they don't throttle, they might simply cancel a user's contract based on vague "excessive use" policies, even though they've promised they can deliver an unlimited volume of data at, say 5mbps up, because they've over-sold their service. -And then we have the problem of "up to 5mbps" because they're not just over-selling, but over-selling to an extent where the advertised speed rate is outright misleading and, I'd argue, fraudulent in some cases (esp. with regional DSL services).
What I think'll really open this meshnet (meshernet?) market up is going to be 802.11ah. Idunno if you've looked into it, but what it's promising is going to have a massive impact on WISPs (whether dedicated-business WISPs or these theoretical new home mesh-WISPs). If 11ah can be pushed as the standard almost exclusively for this new kind of mesh-net (to help minimize interference from other uses), I think this could absolutely take off. Everything about it looks exactly right for a mesh-net. Up to 20mbps on high-penetration 900MHz bands, up to 8000 connections. If we start seeing home routers operating on both 2.4GHz g/n + this new 900MHz 11ah standard, I'm confident we'll be entering the new era where TWC can take over as many ISPs as it likes without seriously threatening the integrity of the Internet.