As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…
I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.
For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.