It's a chicken-and-egg thing, methinks. When I started using the Internet in the early 00's, it was over a metered connection - but my ISP had a FTP server with content where traffic was unmetered, so people could download music and movies even on a meager data cap of 500MB (cheapest plan - I have fond memories of exceeding every metered plan by 2X, causing surcharges until my parents finally caved in and went for unmetered.)
This was later replaced by a private BitTorrent tracker as the government briefly tried to crack down on piracy a few years later; traffic between peers in that tracker was unmetered as well, as they were all clients of the same ISP.
This introduced a lot of people in my city to torrenting; a few more years down the road, data caps were relaxed and eventually removed, another ISP's local tracker evolved into the nationwide filesharing platform that my peers still cherish. (Sure, Hollywood got screwed, but there was minimal value they could extract from our market in the first place, considering the vastly different standard of living.)
Of course, I hear the ISP landscape in the USA is a little different; and with worldwide content streaming services like Netflix and Spotify being paid monthly, usage patterns have surely changed. Maybe today's equivalent would be local ISPs playing the privacy card and providing self-hosted encrypted NextCloud instances?
I'm not sure what percentage of local traffic would this amount to, but it's not that difficult to imagine a world where the atomization of society driven by the non-locality of the Internet is offset by the fact that your cloud services are at least hosted in the same jurisdiction as yourself, and where the Web serves as an augmentation to local communities. (My dark Balkan side does not discount the possibility of walking into one's ISP's office and kicking their asses for fucking with one's connectivity or data, legal consequences notwithstanding - good luck pulling that on Comcast, or flying to Dublin or Frankfurt or wherever to kick Google's ass!)
Maybe it's a little difficult to imagine how this can be competitive to the current globalized landscape though. It would effectively go against the interests of the same entities that fund the underlying infrastructural development, and besides political pushback (e.g. my ISP contract prevents me from redistributing the connection to my neighbors, although I hear this scheme is nonetheless widespread elsewhere) there might also be purely technical scaling issues (such as the existing technology simply being poorly adapted to whatever novel model of organizing connectivity eventually sticks.)