Now it is very difficult to host content content on the Internet. Most users don't realize that they are not directly connected to the Internet. ISPs using something called NAT (network address translation) which corrals you into a private unroutable network. Even though your computer has an "Internet address" assigned by your ISP, it is meaningless outside of your "jail".
In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to make files available to others, you just ran an ftp server on your machine. Today that is no longer possible unless you pay recurring fees to your provider for a "real" Internet address. Just look at your network speed. It might be something like 30 Mbps down, and 5 Mbps up. This asymmetry is not the normal way the Internet was meant to work. Up and down speeds were the same. But now you ISP stands as a mediator between you and the real Internet.
There has been talk of creating an Internet 2. It is still nascent, but it will fix what has been broken and corrupted by the present system. The current Internet has become a one-way street for corporations to track you and to flush their video toilets into your living room. They have turned the Internet into something worse than cable TV. The censorship imposed by Youtube, Google, and Facebook is appalling to all those who remember the early days of the Internet and its promise of the free flow of information and ideas.
Well what would be the alternative? Everybody has a full address space and all manner of havoc happens. That ISP is a shield in both ways.
>In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to make files available to others, you just ran an ftp server on your machine. Today that is no longer possible unless you pay recurring fees to your provider for a “real” Internet address
Yep; they quickly figured out that us having a static IP was useful to us and now sell that back to us. True, it’s easier for *them* to keep a range of IPs available rather than have an IP tied to you like a phone #...
My web hosting is static IP, even though it’s not a dedicated machine. People like to share files through services (dropbox/onedrive/google) but you can also drop files on a web host and link ftp://(place) or http://(place) at will, even if you prefer (w.x.y.z) instead of (domain).
Lastly, I keep seeing smaller fiber companies spring up; as they’re providing gigabit up/down and aren’t also/mainly MSM providers, they seem also happy to provide static IPs.
Wouldn't be difficult. Just need a mesh network with a technological fairness mechanism to keep the bandwidth hogs at bay. If you want to stream video, you would pay the provider. Otherwise you get full up and down bandwidth like everyone else. The key to success, IMO, is to incentivize the services like Amazon and Facebook to hook the mesh to the backbone in exchange for access to the customers in the mesh.