Motherboard/Vice are embarking on an admirable plan to build their own, neutral, mesh, internet network connection provider for their neighborhood in Brooklyn.

What they build, how they build it, and what they learn doing the project, will be documented and available to the general public as a DIY "How To Become Your Own ISP" kind of document.

This is FANTASTIC.

But it doesn't actually route around the Net Neutrality problems introduced this week.

The key sentence happens way down near the end of the article:

"To be clear and to answer a few questions I've gotten: This network will be connected to the real internet and will be backed by fiber from an internet exchange. It will not rely on a traditional ISP."

If you do not buy your internet connection/service from an ISP, then you must provide two things:

1. A connection to the Internet backbone. Last time I looked at this type of connection, they were more than $10k/mo for a connection that worked with a small 20-person business.

2. DNS services. If you are on the backbone, then you MUST both receive and send all the internet traffic that comes to you. This means you must provide DNS services - so the people connected to your local network have an IP Address, so other servers on the internet can talk to them - and you must route traffic to other servers on the internet.

The first problem is paid for by your subscribers, who pay you to provide the connection, and offset your costs for the connection.

The second problem requires you to have a group of computers set up, running highly technical services, and the network admin staff to run, maintain, and keep these systems up to date, protected from hackers, and functioning properly in their role in supporting the larger internet.

Now your little community ISP has three shifts of highly technical and adept staff (say, 3 geeks minimum), working 52 weeks a year, and running multiply redundant systems. AND each of those servers and services you run on those servers need to be backed up by a second, identical, live system, so if a hard drive fails, or software needs updating, or a system gets hacked, the live system fails, and the backup system immediately drops into place.

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Let's tot this up, shall we?

$10k/mo for the sole internet connection. (Double that if you want a redundant one for backup purposes.)

(approx) $200k/year for geeks. Three network engineers who are making anywhere from, say, $50k-$120k/year, depending on the size/complexity of your customer base and their needs.

(approx) $500k in equipment. Servers, software, hardware, etc., that your three geeks keep up and running. And it all needs to be replaced every 3 years or so.

$??? - Offices. Rent. Support staff. Receptionist to answer the phones. Phone system. Desks, chairs, Mountain Dew, HR department, Accounting Department, Billing, etc.

And what do you get in the end, for all this? AN ISP.

Because now you have a company. That company has bills to pay, salaries to cover, employee benefits, 401k plan, operational expenses, etc. So you need to make money. And sell more internet connections to more people, because people die or move out of the neighborhood, or the big local employer moves out of the area and jobs are scarce, so people drop their fancy NetNeutral ISP and go with the cheaper free city-provided wifi.

But your company is the BEST NetNeutral ISP in the area. So people flock to your services.

Now your services are overloaded. You need more hardware. You need more bandwidth. You need more geeks and more phone support staff.

But man... you could expand to the next city over... if you could just get a couple million dollars together.

So you go public. IPO. You sell shares and become a publicly traded company, and get a big infusion of cash, and rapidly expand your operations state-wide. You have hundreds of thousands of new customers all across the state.

At the big shareholders meeting, you have to report that roll-out state-wide has hit unexpected snags, and so quarterly results are down. Your stock price takes a hit.

All of the people who own stock in NetNeutralISP see the value of their stock portfolio dropping, due to NNISP's poor financial performance this quarter.

The board ousts you - the founder - and puts you into a purely advisory position, with a big paycheck and parachute.

They hire a new CEO who promises to revive the company - and the stock value - through offering high-end services to your most exclusive (rich) customers. Getting them to sign up for a premium service will not only help boost quarterly numbers, it'll also give you the capital infusion you need to finish the state-wide rollout, so you can nail down 1.2m new customer accounts.

And that premium service you offer to businesses and high-net-worth individual clients in gated communities? Priority, high-speed, internet access.

And you have just become the problem you originally set out to address, with your community-focused ISP.