In the coming years, this is only going to emerge as a bigger problem as technology becomes more critical in our lives. The temptation will be there for governments and malicious groups to shutdown or interfere with ISPs, and we should do something to avoid disaster.
I've been reading about and experimenting with mesh networks, more interconnected, decentralized systems. The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking) provides a nice introduction, but the general idea is to distribute servers across households worldwide, and to have requests routed through the network, directly toward their destination, rather than through ISPs and large-scale servers. That way, the Internet would be free, and no small group of corporations would control it.
I'm experimenting with different protocol and possibilities right now! Thoughts?