A VPN would still work fine, so long as it was hosted via a commercial internet service. The only issues being encryption with law enforcement backdoors and the VPN service being held liable for how its service is used.

Again, I'm not say this is going to happen (anytime relatively soon). This is just a thought experiment.

I do believe that one day, in a far away time, it will be this way. But by that time the devices we use won't be capable of running anything but a workstation that only has the internal resources to connect to a network, load data to ram and process graphics. The device would be nothing more than a tool for remote access to a virtual machine that runs on some cloud. Very far away stuff, but make no mistake it will end up there one day. There are companies using this already, like retailers (Wal-mart, Target, etc.).

For now I am just looking at firewalling and dynamic IPs.