Ok, but taking it back to my point.
The current design has significant choke points. The incentive to losen those checkpoints isn't there and at best in terms of bandwidth, we're seeing incremental increases vs the exponential increases we see in every other field of computing.
We know that the technology exists to lift these limits and we know that there are some providers who still have routers, switches and gateways running that were built in the pre 9/11 days.
So my proposal. Treat this as damage and route around it, by taking the same concepts we've learned from our experience building digital economies and use it to solve the problem.
Example, imagine if instead of everyone in a crowded room contending for the same wifi bandwidth, that each cellphone, tablet, laptop etc, were able to negotiate to share portions of their bandwidth.
Furthermore instead of a highly insecure "internet of things" turning into a monster botnet swarm, what if that were flipped on it's head and each device became a router, smart enough to help each packet a little further on to it's final destination?
GOOD IDEA. Do it.
I read about a guy in Italy (just looked, can't find it) who proposed building a highly redundant, massively parallel, widely distributed network..for CHEAP. it had to do with 'shared resources' and 'distributed wi-fi'...and 'white space'.
The gist of the idea was that someone could buy a device...and it would connect to other similar devices (within oh...about a mile radius) by wi-fi. As more and more people bought and set up their devices the network would spread, organically. First local, then nationwide, and eventually the whole world would be covered by the net. Data Packets would thus be 'routed' among the WIDELY distributed network, none of which was to be dominated by any one company or group. If a hole in the net appeared, it was routed around.
Sounds like a good idea to me.