IP-based internet relies on so many corporations, organizations, governments, etc., to play nicely. They hoard IPv4 ranges and let you “rent” out blocks of IPs if you pay them enough. This is not free and open access to the internet.
In order to connect to the internet, you are required to pay an ISP. They then dictate how you can use your service. For some residential ISPs, you aren’t allowed to use certain ports, so you cant host your own services like email, websites, etc. You also have to monitor how much bandwidth you are using to make sure you don’t go over your “data cap”. This is why these centralized services are so big for things like email and web hosting. We’ll get more into data collection here in a bit.
IP-based internet is flawed in that it allows DDoS attacks to take out a server that might be limited on protection. There is no redundancy or self-healing properties built-in that will protect the little guy. You can always subscribe to services like CloudFlare, who will then Man-In-The-Middle your internet traffic. You then have to abide by their terms of service, which is not desirable (especially if new hostile leadership were to come in and take over the company). Also, unless you are paying multiple ISPs for redundant connections to the internet backbone, you are vulnerable to Sybil attacks on your network. If subscribed to a single ISP, and it has downtime, you will have downtime along with them.
Any data sent between one IP to another is not encrypted by default. You have to bolt-on entirely different protocols to have that capability. As a result of that, we ended up with a very splintered implementation of encrypting data-in-transit. There are thousands of messenger applications, transmissions protocols, certificate authorities, etc., that often aren’t compatible with others. They also individually have their own set of issues.
Data collection… Ads… Trackers. Oh my! The end user of most modern websites are connecting to multiple servers, even though they visited a single site. Those users are tracked as they hop website to website. Often, these companies keep a profile on anyone matching that fingerprint. You have no control over that data. If you turn off connections to those servers, the website can become unusable. You can’t seriously say this is the best we can do. Why not have a network that prevents you from being tracked?
