I do not believe that many governments would commit economic and political suicide and risk popular revolution by cutting off the internet.
It does seem unlikely at first thought, but your mistake is in assuming that the status quo will be preserved. It will not.
The level of unsustainability that the USG has chosen to take across many different fronts is beyond improbable... It is now approaching sheer ludicrousness. If it were not for Nixon's Petrodollar nonsense, there would be no possible way for the US to exist now at all; and it has already shown many signs of starting to crumble.
Every government in history that is no longer with us went through violent, turbulent times just before their downfall, imposing capital controls and outright theft of their own citizen's wealth on the way down. Billions dead, the rest impovershed, unless they escaped in time. This is why so many of us are attracted to bitcoin; govs can't steal it. Control of the information flow is what allows governments to steal from their citizenry so easily.
The internet has become the primary information flow now. As they get more desperate, their options will run out. Make no mistake, the internet and P2P tech like bitcoin are the direct, existential threat to the state's power that they will most definitely try to destroy in their last-ditch effort to retain it.
The fall of the USA will be unlike any other empire or civilization before it, because the size of the debt is so much larger than any before it. Nuclear war may be kinder to us all.
If it ever got to that stage I would probably be more worried about not getting blown up in the street than about my internet connection.
That's exactly what they hope too... Because you could never mount a decent defense if you aren't even communicating with other people. So NOW is the time to be concerned about this; not when things start really going to pot.
But for the majority, just swapping out the connectivity layer isn't going to magically bring them freedom as in liberty on the internet. I can achieve this today over my existing connection. I can connect to a P2P darknet, emulating a 'meshnet', and no ISP or government can monitor or censor what I publish and access online.
The problem is that the current tools are clunky and only used by a tiny tiny minority.
Those ARE problems that would stop the average joe from seeking a freedom-minded internet connection... Hence, Meshnet. They won't even have to think about swapping out connectivity layers... They'll just buy the router that gives them a free connection to the internet and happens to be secure, too. You're arguing my point for me.
It is my opinion that one can achieve freedom on the internets not by trying to replace the ISPs but by gradually taking the power away from the large centralized services and making the internet decentralized once again.
So you're more afraid of Zuckerberg than you are of obomba? Seems legit...
There are already positive signs as we see that more and more processing happens on the client-side. Javascript based apps that interface with some API in the cloud are becoming the norm. I would like to see this trend continue, a dumbing-down of the cloud with richer clients.
Ah, your real motive revealed. Good, at least from this we have less reason to suspect that you are a USAF sockpuppet bot.
Please forgive the rest of us that want to survive an all-out assault from our governments if we think this might be more important than the progress of Java-in-the-cloud. It's just our silly human nature to fear death and things like FEMA camps, you know.
Then again, if we're all dead and imprisoned, or even if the web is just turned off, who'll progress your precious javascript then?
