I am trying to think how on earth can we avoid that in the future... Every country will turn into an closed-Internet Island. You won't be able to buy anything abroad without being taxed (multiple times), you won't be able to purchase remote services (even if they are far superior).

Government will turn the internet into something unimaginably ugly. Then we'll have books to explain how the internet was once upon a time.

Nothing is stopping you start a new root DNS. In fact, people are doing just that:

    https://bit.namecoin.info/

This is great. Thanks for sharing!

I really see that this is the right direction, however this requires that each user install something in their machines, which wont converge quickly.

It would be interesting to see the major consumer electronics companies, already in opposition to the governments' growing control of the internet, start to add new root DNSes.

Sadly, I suspect a phase of that sort is inevitable. For all the good it has done, the Internet inherently transcends national borders and therefore national cultures, laws, and tax systems. Western governments are, as a rule, all in favour of globalization when it means they can have cheap imports and new export markets, but much less keen on it when it means giving up control or tax revenues.

With physical international travel, and even physical shipping, there are inherent barriers to crossing borders or places where governments can impose checkpoints and reassert their authority at least within their own domain. With the Internet, as long as it remains open as it mostly is today, governments lack that control. Normal people deal with foreign contacts and businesses routinely every day. This is a threat to established powers like big businesses and governments, particularly in economic terms.

Given the most powerful efforts at international trade agreements we're seeing today -- the likes of TPP and TTIP -- are not even being negotiated with real scrutiny by elected legislators any more, never mind the general public, I think we can safely assume that the upper echelons are now so corrupt that the present system is beyond hope. I would like to think that the freedom of communication and sharing of knowledge offered by the Internet would lead to a better system taking over, but as a realist I fear an increasing tendency to lock things down instead, at least for the short-to-medium term. Can't have governments losing their sales taxes, major IP holders losing out to more liberal foreign IP regimes, and the like.

Obviously that lock-down will actually be catastrophic both culturally and economically, by hurting both the normal citizen and the small/young businesses trying to offer better ways to do things. I just don't think the big business/big government complexes that dominate Western politics today care, as long as they keep their figures up for the next quarter/election.

That all said, I remain optimistic that in the long run the advantages of the Internet will win out. Sooner or later a generation who grew up never knowing a world without mobile communications and the Internet will come to power. Before then, corporate and government greed in the West may lead to another financial crisis and questions asked about our current systems of government and business practices last time may turn to direct action in more than just a few places like Greece.

I suspect we're going to go through a pretty dark phase over the next few years as governments and business communities led by people who frankly don't understand the technology anyway most of the time struggle to adapt to a changing world they can no longer manipulate as they used to. But I don't think it will last forever, because the dinosaurs will become extinct in a decade or two and those who replace them will remember what they did.

There is a research and industry effort underway to replace TCP/IP with content-centric or named-data networking. No more servers or IP addresses. All content would be uniquely identified and optionally signed. It would become much easier to control content distribution, since routers would be aware of content names and caching. Think Cloudflare writ large.

Do you have any further details/references, please? I'm a little surprised I haven't heard of any major efforts along those lines.

An article on such a system hit HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9484682

Thanks for the pointer. Project sites include:

http://named-data.net & http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

PARC: http://www.ccnx.org & http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking

NSF Future Internet Architecture: http://www.nets-fia.net

Thanks to both of you for the links. Although it's an interesting premise, I think we can safely assume any large-scale practical implementations of this kind of technology are some way off, so unfortunately I don't think it changes my initial conclusion: we're likely to see more locking down and partitioning of today's Internet for a while, before any more open and robust long-term solutions take hold (perhaps based on the kind of alternative future architectures you mentioned).