There are bazillion reasons that this is nothing more than a cute side project that will fall on its face when its time to scale in any meaningful way. Unless they have discovered a new technology they are not taking on ISPs by any meaningful way. Especially in NYC.
There is a difference between, just "connecting to the internet" and having a "reliable connectivity to the internet", the difference is a massive investment in infrastructure. Wifi p2p mesh networks don't work on magic. They are very unreliable and hard/impossible to scale to 100,000 users, let alone millions of users. In some places, wifi p2p connection hardware actually costs more money than a traditional wired network.
Mesh networks have been around for a while, technical and reliability aspect of this is well understood within the networking industry. There is a reason why it's not widely used, especially in cities. In remote areas, this kind of network makes sense, if you don't have a choice or an alternative.
Don't brush of educated criticisms from people within the industry. I own an ISP for 5+ years (mostly wired). I am not in US and I am not at all worried if this kind of network comes in my country/area. We are not worried because we have tried and deployed this kind of network in cities and they are extremely unreliable and costs real money.
I also don't understand the "Anti-authority" angle of the argument, unless I live in a different universe, they still have to get license/permit from the local government to do this business (non-profit or not), they still have to follow the same rules enforced by local and federal government when it comes to log/customer information sharing to LEO. So not sure how they are Anti-authority? Unless they mean anti-establishment?