Few people are aware of the fact that the Internet that we know and love today almost didn’t happen. It was nearly killed in its infancy due to proposed public-utility regulations like Obama’s new FCC diktat.
You see, way back in the 1980s, when the Internet was called ARPANET and run by the DOD as a loose inter-university research network, the ITU (part of the UN), ATT, and the other worldwide telephone monopolies were poised to steamroll TCP/IP and replace it with highly regulated X.25/OSI/TP4 over ISDN. At one point the US DOD even mandated switching ARPANET to OSI, which would have killed the free-wheeling Internet that we know today. Fortunately it collapsed under its own regulatory weight as the more nimble 4.xBSD hackers at Berkeley ran around them. But it was a close thing.
The beauty of TCP/IP is that it can run over anything and still interoperate. If the regulatory agencies start to strangle the public Internet, expect to see VPNs popping up everywhere that connect to to ‘Outernet’ routers in countries like the Bahamas or other countries with loose regulatory regimes.
Internet, Outernet.
A split is coming. One network will be highly regulated with content controls, speech controls, etc. The other network will be free-wheeling and totally unregulated (with offshore DNS root nameservers).
And of course anyone caught with an Outernet link will be in violation of some law or regulation that will be enforced by the Powers That Be.
Or maybe I’m just a pessimist.
I already use a V.P.N.: That’s how I get my website on the Internet. (Cel phone company only issues static IPs to commercial customers)
Also, whenever I encrypt my communications, the cel phone company does not deduct it from my shared data bucket, as they cannot determine that the data is coming from a computer as opposed to a smart phone. It’s a somewhat weird way to save some money and maintain privacy, IMO.
(Also, most, if not all, smart phones have a VPN client anyway)