[trangus_1985]

> the channels are controlled and watched

Do you think that ham radio couldn't be? Or isn't? What you really want is privacy, authz/authn concerns, and decentralization, it sounds like. And TCP/IP is about as useful as a "PHY" layer for your application as is ham radio.

Plus, solutions like what you're describing require a relative ease of use - unless you only want to talk to the 17 other people in your geographical area who have similar technical backgrounds.

[generalizations]

The whole idea of long range is that my geographical area isn't a limiting factor. I'd be on a 20kbps VPN LAN with the 200 other people in the world who have similar technical backgrounds - especially if we were running this over shortwave.

And that's just the beginning, before people put in the effort to make it more accessible.

TCP/IP isn't the point, it's the encryption that lets me send encrypted, secure emails to my friends over a network that only wideband jamming or a natural disaster can take down.

[gravypod]

Not to mention the amazing software we could build in a distributed P2P way now that we have a massive amount if research into things like CRDTs and consensus algorithms.

We could have a leaderless IRC server, leaderless peer discovery and routing, IP/DNS controlled by consensus.

[ethbr0]

The difference is that the internet, at the physical level, is centralized through interconnects. In a way that radio transmission need not be.