stever: Are there many open/closed mixed products and are we heading back to the "old days" in some sense?

Jonathan_Zittrain: I think the iPhone w/SDK is a good example of a mixed product -- a "contingently generative" technology. I worry it's the worst of both worlds rather than the best - and I see Facebook and Google apps the same way. I like 'em both, but they both reserve the right to kill any app at any time - so it's the old days of appliances, but still the new days of networked: with the vendor having a privileged role in reprogramming the users' experiences.

baked: One of the big security risks we see today are not necessarily the open net but these little high-capacity memory drives that can contain all your source code and walk out the door in one's pocket. So the bad guys will find every seam in the fabric and use whatever tools are available to enter. Not sure which is worse....

Jonathan_Zittrain: Agreed. I think the overall challenge is best put as how to operate successfully in an open environment. What if you couldn't keep secrets? What are the minimum number of secrets to be kept? (SSNs, merger proposals, etc.)

dreamworld: You favor the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet's premier standards body which operates via rough consensus and running code. Here's something you didn't mention: It takes a long time for IETF working groups to finish standards, and sometimes (as in the case of instant messaging) they fail to get standards to market in time to stop proprietary solutions from taking over. What are your thoughts on that?

Jonathan_Zittrain: Yes, I think the IETF may be dead. (Sigh, I probably shouldn't have said that.) What I mean more directly is that the IETF functioned best in a backwater, when people were basically having fun, not taking themselves too seriously. As soon as people with coats and ties (Vint Cerf excluded, of course) started showing up, "rough consensus and running code" became harder to achieve. The story of ICANN is this story in a nutshell, how something -- the top level of the domain name system -- run by one guy with sandals, could become a $30 million+ / year operation and everyone still hating it and little getting done. I even see it reflected in the troubles of going from IPv4 to IPv6.

Jonathan_Zittrain: But what I respect about the IETF is that it only adopted enough process to keep things moving -- focusing at all times as much as possible on substance over process, including "fairness" and "democracy." In the later chapters of the book, I argue that fixing the Net is ours to do, in just the informal, junior, unchartered way the IETF operates (those adjectives taken from the RFC entitled "30 Years of RFCs").