The article discusses two main points (apparently from a book, but I am not going to read that one before commenting): * Infrastructure * Services On the inf

The article discusses two main points (apparently from a book, but I am not going to read that one before commenting): * Infrastructure * Services On the infrastructure side it proposes community owned access to the internet as an alternative to few, often a single, commercial provider for access. These partially already exist (as discussed in the article) but not as widespread as people would want and, worse, got hampered by local laws forbidding these local organizations in many US cities (as far as I remember at least). This seems relatively straight forward and with removal of those laws this could be practices fairly easily for the last-mile problem. For the backbone this is not a solution though. If that was to be "community owned" it would be equivalent to the government running it on the national scale and unclear on how to run the international connections and who shouold own and operate them. As far as I can tell, the privat sector doesn't do a too shabby job at running those (besides major security problems with BGP...). On the services side, the article seems to take a "protocols over platforms" stance, that seems to be popular on HN, too. It leaves open some questions for me, though: What if people do not switch? How to handle existing platforms with severe vendor lock-in or network effects? I think those open questions are not easy or straight forward to answer and that's why the article only goes for the anyways-popular approaches. Although, I don't think the north-korea and china examples are good "deprivatized internet" examples. I have no idea of the north korean internet, but for chinas great firewall my imperssion is it is an enforcement tool for locality and local laws, the internet itself is as privatized as it is outside of it - centralized platforms, some p2p things, ads, tracking and run by mostly private companies. Maybe something like minitel and other original competitors are more of an example for state managed internet. I am by no means educated well on minitel, but afair companies had to register with a central authority to host a service, which cuased severe friction and protectionism problems.