At some point you're just going to need to start shooting the fascists

Latency is horrific though.

Flash drives of banned foreign films are the one method of accessing foreign media that north Koreans realistically have. It's extremely hard to prevent people plugging a flash drive into their computer in their home to view some media

"People" will just comply. Tech savvy people like us are the only ones that could circumvent it

The p2p meshnet that they were referring to basically is a local/small group ISP.

As for why a single person cannot (effectively) become their own ISP? It's complicated. Really complicated. ISPs have to pay other ISPs just like you and I do, unless they're a Tier-1 ISP/Network. Otherwise you're always going to be paying to connect to (and generally paying for bandwidth) another network that has access to a network that then has access to a T1 network. T1s are basically the largest networks that hold (or can directly access) the majority of people on the internet. Top of the food chain, so to speak.

So in theory, yeah, you can become your own ISP - but you'll still need to pay and be at the mercy of other ISPs. Datacenters are typically their own ISP, but they have to pay others to get online just like we do.

this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

Imagine the internet is a network of roads. The ISPs in some parts of town control the roads, in other parts they only control the stop lights. You can build your own road through private land to avoid the stop lights but it’s expensive. The isps can put traffic cops at the stop lights and monitor and stop you if they want. The only way to get around it is to build a road all the way to the destination.

To some degree you could, but you'd either rely on Tier1 transits to access the entire internet (costly), or you'd use IXPs (keeping your traffic local to other IX participants).

This doesn't account for how'd you'd actually go into purchasing a port for your residential home, which would probably entail laying your own fiber to a data center nearby.

Meshtastic will never replicate anything like the modern internet. It’s slower than 1980s dialup data speeds. Text messaging, maybe…but you ain’t sending a video through it, that’s for sure.

I didn't know there were unregulated bands. I thought pretty much everything except 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz required licensing and those two were technically unlicensed, but still regulated.

Owning a lot of Tor exit nodes doesn’t automatically deanonymize users. Exit nodes only see the traffic as it leaves Tor toward the clearnet, not the original sender. To actually identify someone, you’d need to match their traffic entering the network with the traffic exiting - a correlation attack - which requires visibility on both ends. The US doesn’t “own most exits” either; the network is run by many independent operators, and the Tor community actively monitors for malicious relays. Even if a law forced US exit operators to log everything, that alone wouldn’t deanonymize anyone unless combined with large-scale surveillance of entry traffic, which is extremely resource-intensive and not guaranteed to work. In practice, governments can make running exits legally risky, but they can’t just legislate Tor anonymity away.

Only if you're deliberately running an exit node (doing so requires special setup).