The author doesn't quite get it. Nonwithstanding the fact that physical infrastructure is never free (his fido example is a case in point: phone lines), once something turns big corporations will enter the game, and then even freifunk-like architecture would suddenly be corporate-owned, as their nodes outnumber private ones.
Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.
> Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.
This is a good point. But I don't think we should be complacent: if the USA and EU got serious about blocking these, they would be able to shut down both, with the current network infrastructure.
While it's true that physical infrastructure is never free, there is communications infrastructure available that is truly independent and distributed. For example, Ham Radio has the ability to send digital signals around the world. Equipment is required, of course, and our overlords have ruled that encryption on these bands is illegal, and that it cannot be used for business purposes, and so on.
In fact the rules and restrictions governing Ham transmissions are very interesting in light of the evil government/corporate overlord tone of the article.
The book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow proposed a free distributed network formed by peer-to-peer links on hacked game consoles with wifi. Certainly something like that could be done with various technologies we have today including hacked wireless routers.
However untenable the situation, we're (surely? hopefully?) in a better position to do it with today's technology than we were a few decades ago.
Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.