The main problem here is ISPs as a bottleneck. Longer term we need to figure out how to bypass the bottlenecks, which seem to be increasingly acting as points of political control and surveillance. Such a project would need to have a legal and technical side to it. On the legal side there would need to be an area of radio bandwidth reserved for public internet. On the technical side you need mesh networking software and hardware. There is likely to be an evolutionary path between the internet we have now and something which is less dependent upon ISPs.
To bypass ISPs we need to democratize the ISPs and decentralize them some more. Perhaps in the future, I could get Internet in France from a German ISP that has solar-powered drones or balloons over France, or a satellite.
The longer term goal should be to create meshnets, so we can give Internet to each other.
Direct censorship of stuff might not even be the biggest threat, though, but traffic shaping. We could avoid direct censorship if we build more P2P systems, which can't be "taken down". However, they probably could be throttled to a crawl, if the ISP is allowed to shape traffic and discriminate against the type of traffic they choose. Bitcoin for example can't be censored, but it can be made unusable.
The bottleneck is due to the 95th percentile way of billing and the fact big content provider don't buy the bandwidth equally for everyone. Normally you peer (free exchange), if and only if you have almost as much in as out. If you have clearly more input coming to your AS than output, you are supposed to buy your internet transit, else your behaviour is parasitic.
Yes google buys internet transit, but not in Europa, they expect the users to pay for their free services when they are not north american, and they provide the "free VoIP" services this way.
Google, amazon are the problems, they don't assume the cost of their services and make it stand inequally amongst the users. Google is killing the cost model of ISP.
In this condition, how do you expect a sustainable free internet if you destroy the business model of ISP ?
Some people try to address this issue in Europe and especially in France.
I strongly recommend anyone interested to take a look at the DIY ISP project [1]. There is also a map [2] showing existing initiatives and a previous thread on HN [3].
