Imagine having that same perspective on telephone or cellular networks - a world where you could only call other people on the same provider network, or tackle

Imagine having that same perspective on telephone or cellular networks - a world where you could only call other people on the same provider network, or tackle some obscure proprietary bridging system if you wanted badly to call beyond that horizon. Nobody would accept that. Yet for video calling we’ve gone down a path where it’s normalised. Yet the underlying technologies are not so different to those used for traditional audio calling, video codecs and audio codecs and transports for them can mostly be treated the same. I dunno, I realise this is somewhat of a tangent to your point but I think about it a lot and it bugs me to imagine how it could have been if we went the other way. Feels a bit like how large infrastructure project don’t seem to be possible like they were 40 years ago... something makes it that much less likely that a common good will come into being.