That observation is correct.

The problem is not the IP protocol, but rather the users (including corpos). The above were simply new “internets”, their abstinence from the IP stack were not huge concerns when I wrote the comment.

Now, excuse my ignorance, but do the alt internets actually forgo the IP protocol, or just the IP stack? I’ve never tried running them directly on the hardware, so I don’t know if they work without the internet backbone (eg. routing via MAC and IP).