Comment by fuzzfactor

>there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

I'd settle for a maximally private totally uncensored IPV4 like there used to be. Broadband turned out to be over-rated in some ways.

One of the good things about dial-up was the way it was built on a peer-to-peer network that "everybody" already had, their land-line telephone service.

Way before actual "networking", anybody with a modem could connect privately with anybody else who had one.

An ISP could be formed by taking incoming calls from all active digital users simultaneously, and that was where the networking was done, plus connection to other networks around the world.

You could still contact any one computer user privately if you wanted to, without going through an ISP, just like it was before the web.

Also connect one network with another distant one, such as one office building to another, without ISP.

If anybody wanted to form their own working ISP, they could do it privately anytime as an interested group and not even tell anybody about it if they didn't want to. It might not be a commercial ISP but there was no mainstream to begin with where it was assumed that an ISP must be commercial or make any money at all.

These connections were intended to be "totally" private by law, it was well-established that a court order was required to do a wiretap, and the penalty for violation was based on the concept that spying on Americans was one of the worst crimes, and needed to deter those who acted to compromise the privacy & freedom that America cherished so deeply. And preserve citizen rights the country was chartered to uphold, no differently than before the telephone was invented.

There's nothing like this any more, land-line copper is in miserable disuse so the only remaining wire if any is TV cable. But the only way to do peer-to-peer contact over cable is through an ISP, how private is that and why is there not a court order necessary before privacy can be compromised and very select Americans be subject to espionage?

Cell phones won't help you now, they can be tapped without wires.

The options are far fewer than the possibilities offered when dial-up first got popular.