That exists, e.g. Freifunk ("free radio", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk) is a collection of open wifi mesh netwo

That exists, e.g. Freifunk ("free radio", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk) is a collection of open wifi mesh networks in major German cities. The larger ones of these meshes have several thousands of nodes. It is community operated (ie, anyone can participate, though in practice technical issues are driven by technical people and important backbone infrastructure is done with professional hardware). It has an ideological focus on local services, but really what most users use it for is just internet access. And the question is - as a service operator, why would you want to limit something to local people and spotty mesh networking tech, when you could put it on the internet where it can be available to everyone? You're looking at it constructively (add a service for the local community), but from my perspective, availability on the internet is the default, and if there's a local mesh network that encourages people to offer services on the local mesh in particular, that is taking something away that could have been offered on the internet. In a way this is similar to net neutrality - the content should not be tied to the network or vice versa. Obviously over the years that's been a constant point of discussion/contention within the Freifunk community as well, and in general there has been some contention between ideology and technical reality (for example, ideologically, open mesh networks are obviously superior due to fault tolerance and democratized control. But in practice, and in particular the way the real Freifunk meshes are built, things are less decentralized than one would naively expect, the mesh links are unreliable, lossy, bandwidth-constrained, and high latency/jitter, the mesh protocols like batman-adv don't scale well, broadcast spam and management traffic overhead are real problems, etc. - Ideologically there should be no central control, but practically practically you have to have a blessed firmware for interoperability reasons, or if you offer internet access someone needs to control the AS and IP ranges etc.)