Nothing has changed technically. TCP/IP has consistently caused the centralization of power. The 90's Geeks didn't build the protocol, DARPA did (decades prior).

We wanted anyone to be be able to be a first-class citizen of the Net. But we ended up beholden to our Monopoly ISPs. TCP/IP only gives first-class status to ISPs, not to us. BGP doesn't scale if we all tried to have our own first-class routers.

Yes, things are getting better in all sorts of industries; a similar boom occurred with the wide-scale deployment of the 19th century Railroads. But things got better still with the deployment of automobile roads.

I propose we do the same with a globally scalable mesh network.