Talk of things like neighborhood peer-to-peer mesh networks makes me think of local ISP’s and how they once were much more important than they are today. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. Most of the small ISP’s were gobbled up early on by phone and cable concerns, morphing over the years in the Comcast-style “Triple Play” combo deals you’ll find nowadays for connectivity in the United States.

In a neighborhood mesh network, the local ma & pa ISP could potentially blossom again, except the ISP would operate on an extremely small scale, a few people and their computer equipment pooled towards some cause. Forget “cloud computing”, think human-scale computing that serves community. That’s the future of technology. Craigslist is the perfect way of visualizing how powerful autonomous neighborhood mesh networks could really be.

A local ISP or equivalent could also be developed to act as a legal and technological shield for the residents of a particular area and their data usage in such a way as you’ll never get from a gigantic monopoly like Comcast.