[boomlinde]

You can already network smartphones, Raspberry Pis and generally cheap and buildable hardware using IP. IP is transport agnostic and there are several projects to build IP networks over e.g. mesh radio transports.

Then there are application protocols for linked documents and menus that are decidedly simpler than HTTP+HTML like Gopher or the more recent and even less popular descendant Gemini.

The problem isn't so much the technology, but that people in general don't really mind the current state of affairs to the extent that they're going to do anything substantial about it. I could host a private encrypted chat or forum from home and governments and advertisers would be none the wiser about what goes on there. The network infrastructure is there and I have access to it. It's getting people to give up the perceived convenience of gigantic services that's hard.