The internet is just a bunch of interconnected computers.

You act as a tiny, trivial ISP when you install a WiFi access point. This is sort of like that, but more complicated.

Yeah, in theory most anyone with the know-how, money, legal ability and technical ability can be an ISP. You purchase a bunch of pretty fancy equipment, then you need to find some provider to connect to (the internet is just a bunch of ISPs linking to each other), then provide service to your clients somehow.

That's of course easier said than done. First you need to find an existing place with internet access that will sell to you. Then you need the hardware. Then you need to reach your customers somehow.

The possible roadblocks are that an ISP might not want to cooperate with you, the legal requirements for something like digging streets and laying fiber may be hard to comply with, and equipment is expensive.

How is cryptocurrency ever going to work as an actual currency? It's been around for more than a decade now, and as far as I can see, this idea has completely failed on several fronts:

• Cryptocurrency scales extremely badly -- it relies on every node performing a significant amount of work, and which is exactly the same calculations done on every node. This means it can only run as fast as the slowest node wanted on the network, and that extra nodes don't add capacity. If say, ETH bumps its limits it means some nodes won't be able to keep up and desync.
• Inflation seems an unsolved problem. Either there's none, in which case the currency deflates and becomes unappealing to use as a currency. Or it inflates at some constant rate, which means it's unlikely to match economical needs.
• Decentralization isn't working on the user end -- exchanges and custodial wallets are plentiful. Dealing with the actual network as an user is complicated and impractical.
• Decentralization isn't working for governance either -- In practice cryptocurrencies have "tiers" of users. Developers, miners, and exchanges have far more influence than normal people, and turn into effectively new, unelected rulers of the system.

So, are any projects working on fixing these issues, and how?

Yup.

Also, fun fact, computers lie to users all the time. Eg, say you're playing a game and save. The game with very high likelihood will tell you it has saved well before the computer actually did it, and resume playing.

Why? Because people hate waiting, and the computer can actually do the writing to disk while you keep playing without making you wait for everything to be done.

There's many, many such optimizations.

Okay.

Politics is trying to convince the people who make the rules to make rules you like, not to make rules you don't like, or to try to reach some sort of compromise.

You can do that by either trying to influence the actual people who make the rules, or the people they listen to.