They can’t take it away if they don’t control it:
Let us never forget that the easily-cowed ISPs of Egypt bent willingly and cut off Internet access during Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution. Fortunately, the heroics of people who brought Internet-in-a-suitcase rigs, the cleverness of dial-up networking to foreign ISPs, and some fascinating cell-phone-buried-on-a-hill tactics got the people back in touch with each other well enough to coordinate their efforts. (See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-shadow-web)
We may well need some such heroics in the future.
How about putting a Linksys router in a Tupperware box on your roof? People are doing it in Vienna, and a similar project has been underway for years in Athens. Everyone joins a common network, no ISP required, no special software, just plain old 802.11 wireless. Read about the Vienna project at
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/02/24/activists-creating-decentralized-mesh-network-
that-cant-be-blocked-filtered-or-silenced/?utm_source=Naked+Security+-+Sophos+List&
utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ad6a3a0271-naked%252Bsecurity
And how about larger scale networking, like an alternative Internet routing layer? See http://freedomboxfoundation.org.
Or maybe a complete alternative Internet? It’s not just a dream, it’s Project Byzantium: http://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/Byzantium.
All of this is to say, we’d better be thinking about this, if we really value our freedoms on the Internet. Fortunately, at least a few people are. Are you?