No Stupid Questions

Take a look at a project called reticulum.

The internet is a mesh network already.

The thing is, the Internet routing protocol BGP delivers basically everything that a mesh network requires, except for the physical data links that carry the data. Keeping things short, BGP is a way to declare where certain IP addresses can be found. So an example announcement BGP would be something like "2608:120::/32 can be found at AS721", where AS stands for Autonomous Network, a subnetwork that is controlled by a single entity. In this case, that IPv6 range belongs to the USA Department of Defense (DoD) and AS721 is the identifier for their network.

Now, the trick is to figure out how your own AS can reach the AS of your destination, which is no different than a mesh: the DoD's AS721 is solely connected to AS3356 (the massive ISP named "Level 3"), which is a very likely connected to the upstream AS of your link to the Internet, which means there is a valid path from your AS to the DoD.

Whenever an intermediate AS disappears from the global Internet, its former peers will reroute through other links to maintain a path to the largest number of AS's (as in, the Internet). In this sense, having multiple links to different AS's is important for redundancy, and is no different than a mesh network having multiple RF paths.

Finally, if multiple link failures occur -- say, a Tier 1 ISP goes completely down -- then the network becomes fragmented, but traffic within each fragment will still pass. This is akin to a mesh between two cities, where the mountain-top repeater is struck by lightning. Locals in each town can still send messages, but not over the hill to the next town.

Is BGP perfect? Heavens no. And it has its own issues with maliciously-crafted announcements. But everything that BGP does is analogous to what mesh networks do. It's merely that the participants are highly commercialized today, whereas in the 80s, it was mostly universities and a few defense contractors experimenting.

The technology is basically here, but it's how it gets used that will dictate out how history will be written.

Not really possible, you could do intranets but once you reach really long ranges (such as overseas, or even large unhabitable areas) any radio solution is going to be either really slow or really unreliable or both (and any physical infrastructure needs an owner to fund it and maintain it, coming back to ISPs)

Imo, in an ideal situation, the internet should be made of mesh intranets that are about city wide, and ISPs would be the ones connecting between these intranets, keeping the best of both worlds while also supporting and encouraging local services which would provide local economical growth on top of the advantage of federated infrastructure and local privacy laws.

Imagine every household has a router that instead of connecting to an ISP, is connected to a mesh network with all of the neighbors, and in each neighborhood there would be an ISP router that would act as the gateway to the internet. Anyone can freely join any intranet, while ISP connections would be paid (preferably by some sort of local authority and not per household) and just like today, anyone who has special infra needs can connect directly to the ISP by making an account.

You don't the bandwidth is too low it would be more a bbs.

Do you mean through radio waves like APRS, 10m BBS, or HAMNET? Interent though peer to peer like Freenet (Hyphanet)? Or solely through Mesh like MeshBBS?

I think the issue with running through Mesh is bandwith and range. Look how "limited" APRS or 10m BBS is (I know FCC band requirements and what not)