[meekmind]

I'm a little confused by this sentiment. The internet is a distributed system that, over time, became centralized into fewer and fewer hands. The internet wouldn't really function any different on a mesh network, except the nodes are much more distributed. In other words, they are both largely the same.

You might ask, how was this problem solved for the normal internet?

The answer is: It was *not* fixed, we just centralized the problem into fewer and fewer hands. Then that created a new problem centralized internet being easily monitored, controlled, censored, etc.

No one needs to explain how to deal with bad actors with a mesh net because there is no basis of comparison for an internet where that problem was ever solved to begin with. The problem they are trying to solve is centralization. If you argue that the biggest risk to the internet is the central controllers _being_ the bad actors, then it's a win. If you argue that there are other bad actors and having a mesh net won't eliminate them, then you just have a really convenient excuse to do nothing while the same bad actors frolic through-out the existing internet fairly unimpeded anyway.

[dredmorbius]

ISPs and hosting providers can and do take abusive accounts offline if necessary.

Routing means that endpoints can usually be identified with reasonable accuracy.

In the early days, access was through a very small number (single digits, double, a few dozens, a few hundreds) of organisations, mostly US-based research universities. When I first had access to the ARPANET / Internet, if I was abusing resources, I got an email, or visit, from the campus systems admin.

A substantial portion of present-day ISP and datacentre operations is geared at abuse detection and mitigation, both ingress and egress.[1]

Unmanaged mesh ... seems to present a much greater problem here and the entire question is simply hand-waved away. As you're doing here.

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Notes:

1. Much of this information is informal, but as a recent high-level overview (2017) see: https://abusix.com/resources/isp/what-security-should-an-isp...

[meekmind]

> question is simply hand-waved away

I think you misunderstood me. Giving a handful of companies control over the credibility economy is not a solution and is in some ways worse than having no credibility economy at all. These "abuse detection" systems break down when they are perpetrating the abuse. In other words, as central authorities starts choosing who has access to what according to increasingly arbitrary, political, or cultural lines. The problem wasn't really solved because the free and open internet cannot continue to exist under those conditions.

Is it far fetched to assume that a bottom-up system can't also develop a decentralized credibility economy to complement the decentralized network? I think not, and one thing would likely follow the other in due course.