[modernpacifist]

The [ONT → OLT(+BNG)] → Internet] sections of the paths will continue to be owned by commercial entities that can still be the subject of court orders and/or government pressure.

Even if you were to roll your own cable in the ground to your own ONT/OLT/BNG at some point you will need to acquire IP transit or peering from other commercial entities.

[direwolf20]

The latter usually isn't that difficult, just expensive. You can usually rent a leased line from anywhere to anywhere. The government will still come knocking if they think you're evading their censorship.

[modernpacifist]

A leased line though will only get you A<->B where sure, A and B can be anywhere but have to be concrete locations/hand off points when provisioned. It does ultimatley come down to the service that one orders from a commercial entity.

A hypothetical court order saying something like "kill internet access" would likely cause an IP transit service to stop working (implemented by said provider no longer announcing global IP routing tables to that service) but a leased line between two locations would likely remain untouched since that isn't an "internet" service. So they might not need to come knocking if they're reasonably confident that all such edge cases like leased lines end up at dead-ends because any internet-capable product they might be enabling access to is sufficiently disabled.

I do imagine though that if they get as far as "kill the internet" that obtaining a subsequent court order to go after some suspicious leased line would be trivial.

As a side note, I find that IP transit is typically the cheapest aspect of providing an internet service since a cross-connect at a well connected DC will cost well under $1/Mbps/month unmetered. Plus the cost is very well amortized when residential users are the target. This has tended to hold when one takes into account the co-lo costs as well since network gear doing relatively basic packet forwarding/internet table routing doesn't take up that much space or power.