@Sorceren – I enjoy following your thoughts on this issue :) Regarding taking away the internet. So long as it’s not the ISPs or owners of the phone lines or central routing servers which compromise the underlying spine of the internet, I doubt it can ever be taken away or even crippled by a purposeful attack. Well I could see some type of server DDOS aided by a botnet virus hammering down and effectively choking the internet for a few hours before the server custodians would notice and start solving the problem. But even if the internet as we know it ceases to exist, another one would rise from its flame, starting out as a small network of computers, then expanding and connecting these networks via whatever the new means of communication would be.
But, if the ISPs start conspiring with people who do not have the internet’s openness in mind, such as the recording industries in America are planning on doing and like some in Europe are succeeding at doing already, this is when we start going down the slippery slope into the internet becoming crippled compared to what it is now. Once one type of data transmission is monitored or hampered, it’s easy to persuade them to do another type, and then another, until we have some crazy situation like in Australia.
I like your comparison with a carriage builder, however the situations are not exactly the same. There will always be some desire for a carriage, even if it’s in the old-style-world recreation parks or for the rich people’s amusement. Sure, a great deal of them moved out of the trade, but that is simply the price that the advancement of technology carries. I mean, we don’t seem to mourn the loss of horse tamers either. With the destruction of the internet though, nothing is gained, in fact it would be analogous to all of the printing presses being destroyed and the banning of all books in terms of hampering humanity’s progress.
Simply due to the way the internet is set up, I would find it extremely unlikely that it could be ‘taken away’ from Joe Blow. However it’s very likely that the internet we know today will not really be that of the future, until we can tell the ISPs and cable-owners to stop advertising speeds they can’t deliver and to start investing in the next generation of wires with capacity to serve the internet’s needs. This strikes a bit close to me here in Canada because our phone line infrastructure were created with our tax dollars way back when, and now the builder/controller of the lines (Bell Canada) chooses to throttle and mess around with not only their own paying customers but the wholesale internet sold to other companies. The other competitor, Rogers, is no better, having implemented a 60GB limit as well as never achieving their advertised speeds. Data pricing in Canada is atrocious especially on cell phones, and there is NO reason this needs to be other than corporate greed. While p2p represents a lot of the bandwidth being occupied, the next biggest category is simple web browsing thanks to YouTube and streaming video everywhere. The ISPs are trying to block off p2p to free back up the lines, but they’re just going to get clogged again in a few years time. As usual though, big companies prefer to not do work (build the next generation of lines) and take your money instead. And sadly the government is letting these monopolies continue. Go lobbyists. Disgusting.