While these are non-trivial hurdles, they are surmountable. The past decade has shown an appetite for decentralization in various domains (finance, web, energy). Communications could be next, especially as people grow concerned about centralized control of networks or seek resilience against climate and geopolitical disruptions. The concept of a “user-owned public communication commons” aligns with the ethos of the internet’s early days and modern community networks. By converging improvements in protocol design (as evidenced by recent research
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), signal processing (multi-packet LoRa demodulation, interference cancellation), and open collaboration (standardizing mesh protocols), we have a pathway to overcome current bottlenecks.