Why even bother with name servers? Don't you punch in your friends' phone numbers and save them in your address book?

Use low speed, low bandwidth Amateur radio for the long distances. You've heard of bootleg stations? Make nodes directional and aim them. I'd be willing to use frequencies I'm not allowed to legally use if I'm using a directional transmitter.

Then how about us 5% start our own new-internet-that's-not-the-internet and make connections to each other! --Awkward silence--

I'd be willing to start one in my area and I know plenty of others who would support such a thing, too. I think wired connectivity would be a problem, but wireless is another matter. We have plenty of protocols to prevent the girl next door from seeing your porn and bypass those evil nodes that can and will sprout up (ToR). We also have torrenting that would make downloading video less painful than the worst case scenario you might be imagining. I think we can afford to sacrifice some luxury for the little bit of control we can gain. The only snag is purchasing the equipment to build the nodes. Nodes can optionally be bridges to the internet, too. Whatever can't travel across the private network can hop onto the internet at a node and travel along there for a while. Since I don't think people will abandon there ISPs until this "public intranet" matures, they can use their ISP or optionally advertise to the node that they are a bridge. I think the only thing that decides if this sinks or floats is dependent on what benefits there would be to hopping onto the private intranet until it matures. For several years, the intranet would be spotted communities across various areas. We can defeat that by connecting those spotted communities with long range wireless transmission. Anyone read the last paragraph from the article? Anyone following?