Is it just me, but the continuous, crushing global regulation of the Internet both in what content is legal, what our allowed "bandwidths and data caps are", what behaviors or opinions can be freely expressed, and a constant barrage of advertisements are making it as boring as television?

I don't pay for television. I won't pay for the public Internet if this trend doesn't stop.

There's plenty of private alternatives. Grandma can enjoy her walled gardens of Facebook and have her viewing habits sold off ten times over. I'll pass.

But this time, it was the VC's, private equity, and angels who are holding the declining valuations, not the post-IPO institutional and retail investors.

About time they stop tossing hot potatoes to us -- they finally got burned!

Completely agreed, the suggestion was in jest. :)

How about just create domain names using letters A through F and get creative with IPv6 hexadecimal abbreviated addresses. ;)

No DNS to legally hijack, as long as you can reasonably hold the IP address and scale solely through anycasting.

Great, and the big providers will still cap us to cable speeds from a decade ago and charge for overages!

Despite the egregious lack of corporate responsibility, perhaps there could be some useful application of the data for traffic safety and road engineering.. for instance, if traffic engineers can see what roads are congested which have too low of a speed limit imposed, they could propose raising them? A pipe dream, but I have to believe someone looking to optimize traffic flows would consider the design upside as well as the police simply considering how to generate revenue.

Well, he's done a lot more than just hard-core programming work... this isn't his first time in space: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chamitoff.html

Wow... this is a great idea! Providing a Tor or I2P channel for free is an awesome way to contribute to onion routing networks and provide a more "secure" way to run an insecure public setup. I'm curious what would have to be done to expose a Freenet node in this way... such that the interfaces for managing the node were blocked, but regular traffic wasn't impeded.

It's absolutely possible and fairly easy these days with out of the box router firmwares, or if yours doesn't support QoS (Quality of Service), then you can potentially put on an open-source firmware -- DD-WRT to provide that ability and much more. QoS lets you designate classes of traffic, such as streaming, gaming, and other protocols, or particular devices on a WAN or plugged into the router itself and set priorities for them. Doing this, you can share your WiFi AP (good for you!), but also get the lions' share of your bandwidth when you are wanting to use it.

The question "Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?" is pretty irrelevant: if they government can subpoena your mail account for any reason, without notification, you know, to prevent any sort of "terrorism" (against the state, content providers, the prevailing political ideology)... then they already are your de facto mail provider.