And will that network include undersea cabling, satellites, or some equivalent means of global connection? I doubt it: these are all extraordinarily expensive.

And will that network include undersea cabling, satellites, or some equivalent means of global connection? I doubt it: these are all extraordinarily expensive. Even the cheapest approach imaginable - say, a series of network repeaters on rafts - is still quite expensive, not to mention incredibly brittle. I'm all for distributed networks, local meshes, and other initiatives to reduce network hardware centralization. That said, these are not perfect substitutes for a global network. For instance: I'm based in Canada, and my work currently deals with digital service deployment in government. As part of that work, I occasionally need to refer to the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) website. No amount of local network infrastructure can help me do that: I rely on the trans-Atlantic cables to access this. Now, you could imagine mirroring the GDS website across a number of these local distributed networks, forming what is in essence a CDN under distributed ownership. That might help me right now, but: in a network monopoly world, how would you mirror content on an ongoing basis in the first place? Who would maintain such a mirror? How would you pay for the immense storage requirements? (Or, failing that, how would you decide which corner of the Internet to mirror?)