> My router becomes profitable when I make its bandwidth scarce. The same incentive applies to everyone else with a router.
If you make your bandwidth scarce (and expensive) someone else with a router may be incentivized to make their bandwidth slightly cheaper; so you end up with zero profit (as you have no customers). This is the fundamental reason why market-based strategies are effective; you are competing with everyone else's router, not cooperating.
In a finite pie model, yes, there's a Hobbesian war of all against all. Another model has Apple and Google agreeing not to poach each other's employees.
The idea of micro-transaction tariffs for traffic on the internet has been around since the 1990's when people were not sure that the internet could scale using the shared bandwidth model. It did, and micro-transaction tariffs never took off because it didn't solve an actual problem.
The article doesn't mention any existing problems that micro-currency tariffs would solve. The only problem crypto-currency in its current form solves is one of the minor problems with micro-transactions - it more easily allows for very small values to be treated as integral outside the system of micro-transaction - i.e. crypto-currency in its current form might not require aggregating many micro-transactions in order to purchase goods or services unrelated to the internet.
If you make your bandwidth scarce (and expensive) someone else with a router may be incentivized to make their bandwidth slightly cheaper; so you end up with zero profit (as you have no customers). This is the fundamental reason why market-based strategies are effective; you are competing with everyone else's router, not cooperating.