ISPs will not be letting that traffic through. So no little romantic underground. No cycle; the internet is happening just once, and we're in it. The assumption that everything is necessarily part of a little epicycle of history somehow mashes together Whig history and and an inert nihilism. Don't worry, nothing matters?
We're not in a movie. When they close the open internet, there will be no reason for them to open it back up. Everybody's Playstation will still work. Facebook will still work. Twitter will still work, but it will be all blue checks.
In the future they may not even sell general purpose computers to the public that can access the internet. The network will kick them off as unsigned machines. Maybe they won't let anything on the internet that is capable of running illegal or unlicensed encryption.
The open systems will have to be physical places where we go meet each other, and don't bring our phones. Of course, they could make you carry your ID in your phone (for a few years, there'd just be a $100 charge for a physical ID until they eventually just phased them out), or make you carry cash in your phone, so how could you meet up in person if they didn't want you to?
If we're talking cyberpunk dystopias, we'd have to resort to hand-soldered audio couplers that use our locked-down phones as modems. Once the next Android/iOS update detects and blocks unauthorized binary carriers, we'll have to steganographically hide our traffic in fake voice calls. Crappy baud rate, but good enough for encrypted text. Augment with sneakernet and local hard-wired networks running under lawns and dorm room carpets.
Although in this grim future where all communication is monitored and censored, people like you and I will probably be up in the hills in the rebel camps, and open networking protocols might be low on our list of priorities.
Now I kind of want to build one just for the challenge. Analyze what frequencies can get through, and reverse engineer the phone company's codec so I can send a pirate signal, like a phreaker of old.
Fun fact: You can no longer do such a project in software on stock Android. They locked down the voice audio API.
We're not in a movie. When they close the open internet, there will be no reason for them to open it back up. Everybody's Playstation will still work. Facebook will still work. Twitter will still work, but it will be all blue checks.
In the future they may not even sell general purpose computers to the public that can access the internet. The network will kick them off as unsigned machines. Maybe they won't let anything on the internet that is capable of running illegal or unlicensed encryption.
The open systems will have to be physical places where we go meet each other, and don't bring our phones. Of course, they could make you carry your ID in your phone (for a few years, there'd just be a $100 charge for a physical ID until they eventually just phased them out), or make you carry cash in your phone, so how could you meet up in person if they didn't want you to?
If we're writing stories.