A network is like a community, a nation, you can't make just one all by itself. You need millions, and they need to talk, and co-ordinate. You can't just make a standard and hope a million people build to it, or can you? If people are going to propagate a standard, it must be easy, it must be useful, and it must be universal. In the early stages, it must be bootstrapped into existence based on small scale usefulness, and then later see its real worth rise as the many "local"s connect into one "global". So, what we need is an idea for bottom up networking, that is useful all the way from the tiny to the global, and is easy enough for people with only a little time, money, and technical knowledge to implement. I think we need a hub and a protocol.
meshtastic.org https://reticulum.network/index_pl.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25 and new fAX.25 ; bridgefly ; gotenna ; pocketradio https://packet-radio.net/direwolf/ ; https://github.com/freifunk-gluon/gluon .... etc