Intentional communities. Intentional internet, What if we had network nodes, in communities, which could only be accessed by community members, only contributed to by community members, and only seen by community members (via tunneling)
One of the big issues for this is just cost, plain and simple. Not just in terms of cash to set up, but also ongoing. What I think would work fairly well would be for each community to have a secured wireless network set up, with a small server running 24/7. That's where one of these come in; It's a "fit-PC2" It's solid state, low power and not bad on price at around $400. Full specs can be seen here for the fit-PC2i. To sum it up though, Intel 1.6GHz 1 GB memory 4GB Flash slot Here's the kicker though. It only uses 8 watts of power at full load, 6 watts at low power. That means for a month, it uses at the most 5.7kW or less then $1.00 per month for power (if you are on grid). Of course, you would also need to have an always on net connection, which also means the modem will need power, as well as the wireless hub. Create a VPN across multiple communities and you would have what you wanted. Each person that wants to be connected can choose their method as long as it has wireless networking on it. Any permanent buildings could have network cables run to them and each have VoIP numbers set up. New people show up, a few minutes of work and they could have their 'own' phone number for people to contact them. The internal networks would also remain running even if net connection was lost.
The thing is, the internet exists to be open, an isolated community has other advantages (universities do this all of the time, because they don't want idiots commenting on peer reviewed papers) for example, if you wanted a safe place to talk about drugs, you could exclude law enforcement. if you wanted to share personal information with only vetted people, you'd have that option. think of it as a network free of nannying.
