I'm the founder of ZeroTier and just saw this article. I've spoken to Bob a few times in the past and while we appreciate the mention there wasn't any coordination. (We'd have timed it to not be right before a holiday. :)

I think what he's arguing is that fully encrypted p2p overlay networks would be the next step beyond privacy VPNs, and would be more powerful. Basically if we "encrypt all the things" then ISPs will only see opaque encrypted traffic and will be unable to effectively implement really fine-grained traffic prioritization/de-prioritization.

What he suggests would be possible. People and services could join public ZeroTier networks and you'd have this flat "meta-Internet" where everything was encrypted and all traffic looked the same.

I don't think this is a silver bullet. ISPs can still make deals with big players like Netflix, Google, Facebook, etc. and offer them at a higher speed on the "clearnet." Other traffic would be relegated to the "other" category that would be slow-laned on non-premium plans. This applies to more conventional privacy VPNs and anything else just as much as it applies to ZeroTier.