or tunnel through existing infrastructure, which you would be anyway with the other options. I actually like that the internet is a library, a shopping mall and any number of other things all at the same time and am not too fearful that yanking DNS entries would be such a terrible thing. I never used fidonet but I did have a uucp email address and set up dialers to get email working between unix systems back in the 80's. I feel like we are always tunelling over something existing, so why not use the most convenient. Wouldn't a VPN over the public internet give you the same result? Of course, your provider could pull the plug on you, but you switch to another, just like if someone else started transmitting on your frequency if you're using ham radio. the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption (which they are also unable to define, or rather differentiate between providing confidentiality vs message ciphers for obscurity) so you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary traffic.

There's nothing forcing any of us to use ATT or comcast or whomever, its just a more fun place on a network where there are more people. If you grew up with uucp as your mail carrier and progressed to ccMail and finally a netcom shell account you'll remember how boring it was reading physics papers on gopher servers and looking at fluid dynamics latex documents. There was a time though between gopher and veronica and today's 500 million people wasting 2 hours every day checking out each other's cat washing stories and playing at being farmers. Maybe I'm just remembering it all wrong, but I kind of like the current internet.