The ssh and vpn charges will predictably be outrageous and seriously curtail the popularity of darknets. Similarly with any alternatives that are centralized by service or protocol. It'd be an awfully tall technological order to create a distributed Tor-style traffic relay to the darknets.
Or are you suggesting pirate wireless carriers?
That said, if such a too-difficult-to-effectively-filter Tor-style relay came into being, that certainly would be a Big Deal.
If they start banning the protocol from routers, we can tunnel it through other protocols. You can push anything you want through an HTTPS link. Good luck banning that protocol.
Or we can do the wireless-mesh thing. There are a lot of people working on mesh-based peer to peer routing layers and DNS. Wish I could remember what the projects were called...
I've always liked the idea of wireless mesh networks. [1]
But it would limit exposure to ideas, code and data by physical distances. Even expanding out Bacon-style along the social graph as people move about, it would be a huge step back for unfiltered communication. [2]
[1] It's a rather romanticized attachment, that originally hinged on people one-day realizing that having all your data primarily on other people's computers probably isn't a great idea.
[2] Though that, too, triggers appealingly romanticized notions of 'place', 'dialect' and 'local culture'. Which is to say: it would all make for great cyberpunk fiction atmosphere; I'm just pretty sure it'd still suck compared to the current state of affairs.
From the point of view of the establishment what happens to hackers is of little importance. Hackers or other tech-savvy users will always find ways over, under or around whatever walls exist. This happens today in countries like China. All the establishment is really very concerned about is the majority of average internet users (who may or may not also vote).
