That is a beautifully-written article. The IEEE hardware and IETF software guys have been busy adding complexity to the networks, with so many legacy protocols

That is a beautifully-written article. The IEEE hardware and IETF software guys have been busy adding complexity to the networks, with so many legacy protocols (when everyone just uses TCP/IP) and extra ports (when everything happens on port 80 - seriously, even email is now on cloud services). I can't get LTE because of political problems. So I just gave up trying to be online, and started caching everything possible. Meanwhile, storage is getting larger capacity, smaller size, and cheaper. I've got a 512GB SD card in my pocket all the time, with a backup of my laptop in case my bag gets stolen. My phone does everything offline if possible. Offline MP3 music. Offline maps. Wikipedia. StackOverflow. Hacker News. FML. UrbanDictionary. XKCD. The few YouTube videos I actually want to see again. The only thing I need Internet for is communication. To send a message, I walk around looking for open WiFi and type my message to them on Facebook Messenger. If they need to reach me urgently, they can just use my phone number (which keeps changing every 6 months for the same political problems). What if access points had large caches with mirrors of the content people want? Instead of asking Google's server in the US to send me a map tile, what if I could just get it from the local WiFi AP's web server? It would be much faster, and save so much trouble with networking. Sure, there are some things that people need the network for (e.g. new content, copyrighted material). But so much else is free of licenses, and would be possible to mirror locally everywhere.