It might be true that devices could connect across the US-Canadian border, but most borders are dead spots.
I suspect that, when territory was being scammed, stolen, claimed, fought over, whatever... borders tend to develop in those places where there isn't a big population. And those borders have tended to remain empty. There will be exceptions, but not enough to matter.
Short of science fiction devices, I dunno wormholes or split-particle pairs or whatever, I don't think this is viable.
True, most connections would be within individual cities, so you would definitely need it to hook servers and satellites into the mesh so you can cross dead zones. But that would already be a huge win for humanity.
Presumably the people who control the data links between population centers could just cut off the Internet, no? Doesn't that largely defeat the anti-censorship advantages of something like this?
> At worst, the mesh is no worse than what we have right now.
No, it won't make it easier to censor--no one is arguing that.
> In reality there will always be some people moving around between cities, satellites and drones passing overhead, and enthusiasts setting up antennas.
It's trivial for a regime to find people who are illicitly operating wireless backbone infrastructure (backbone is the stuff that connects a mesh cluster to the rest of the Internet); they're broadcasting a big, loud signal. And if it's not wireless backbone infrastructure, it's physical and thus the same problems present as today. And this is assuming the regime won't just forbid mesh devices, full stop (sure, a few might be smuggled in, but they're easily located and useless without mass adoption).
> If mesh devices become ubiquitous, and they will,
This is extremely unlikely. The arc of the Internet has bent toward centralization. Mesh implies tradeoffs, especially with respect to performance, and the overwhelming majority of consumers (and businesses) are going to pick performance over the abstract benefits of decentralization--mesh is unlikely to achieve the mass adoption necessary to make it useful even in a basic capacity.
There's still plenty a central authority could do, for example (1) banning mesh equipment altogether or (2) requiring that nodes in the mesh implement the government blacklist (and they could run nodes in the mesh to audit compliance). Pretty sure you need something more than mesh networking to make this work--you need an anonymous routing protocol so nodes in the middle don't know the address of the origin or destination nodes.
