FidoNet is still living, however it lacks at least strong authentication and data confidentiality (no crypto used at all). But it shows that people could be capable of creating global networks without unwanted third-parties.

For building store-and-forward networks I created NNCP several years ago and lack of connectivity, censorship (making no connection links) are one of the issues it aims to solve: http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html