I remember a progression going something like this: 1. Local folks taking turns calling a handful of BBSes. 2. BBSes synchronizing some messages with each oth

I remember a progression going something like this: 1. Local folks taking turns calling a handful of BBSes. 2. BBSes synchronizing some messages with each other, even long-distance. 3. BBSes providing some limited Internet services (email, newsgroups). 4. Quasi-Internet services like Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL. 5. Slow but "real" Internet access. All content available but still had to ration use. 6. Fast, ubiquitous, unmetered, unthrottled Internet. 7. An ISP that doesn't care if you run a server. While I strongly sympathize with anyone sitting at #6 or #7 who views a move to any previous step as a huge regression, I can't sympathize with denying people any kind of connectivity unless they can snap their fingers and manifest the infrastructure to enable #5. All of those previous steps served a purpose at the time. Developing economies have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes as first mover, and leapfrog ahead to something more robust against all these threats we're facing today (centralization, stratification, eavesdropping, denial of service, walled gardens...). BBSes were an artifact of the old phone infrastructure, so that's not a necessary phase, but otherwise the story would look roughly the same: Local communities gradually connect peer-to-peer and then interconnect. This time wirelessly, securely, without entrenched middlemen.