I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.
Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.
It happened long ago. We had a decentralised Internet, with end-to-end communications the norm. Money is more easily made with centralised control of users, though, so money is more readily spent on centralisation of services.
Ultimately, Discord/Slack/Whatnot succeeded over Jabber because far more money was put into services that can be commercialised than was put into something that's very hard to make a buck out of.
The run-out of IPv4 has massively exacerbated the problem, because with carrier grade NATs now the norm, protocols have to work via a central server to connect two end users. There won't _be_ a new decentralised killer app.
Well, if social unrest gets really bad across the globe we might see something like mesh networking with a mesh social media system spring up, I suppose.
I think that nightmare is being realized right now - China & Russia have a head-start. I see balkanization of the internet as inevitable. Unless there's a breakthrough on the securing internet-connected devices and equipment, the strategic importance of defending local systems from foreign attacks cannot be ignored, and the most effective way is to sever international connections entirely (even temporarily) without disabling local connectivity which would be disruptive.
Look at the long number of countries that turned off the internet after social unrest in the 2 years alone (mostly to block protesters organization via social media) - if those countries had the technical capability to keep the localnet up, they would have.