One thing the article didn't mention, which I've been considering in regards to this problem: an RF-based internet alternative would be prone to all sorts of other forms of government interference/monitoring. The U.S. government already has serious resources at its disposal for the purpose of intercepting or jamming RF transmissions. For "intercepting," this includes high-power decryption capabilities, and for "jamming" this includes noise jamming but also spoofing and signal insertion. So even if an RF mesh-network of some sort were to be established, the government would be able to:

1: Know exactly where every transmitter is. This means they can find you in meatspace even more easily than they can on the hard-wired internet.

2: Listen in on your transmissions without all of the legal issues associated with wiretapping. To make sure they can do so, they would probably need to pass a law prohibiting the use of many types of cryptography on unlicensed RF transmissions. Such a law would be much easier to sell to the general public "because the terrorists could be using it to coordinate attacks." If you break this law, expect a knock on your door almost instantly because of #1, above.

When you combine #1 and #2, busting "pirates" becomes trivially easy: somebody sees a "suspicious" file in your transmissions, localizes your transmitter, and a few minutes later you get a knock on your door.

There's other stuff, like injecting false traffic, etc.