stever: So your world is defined by expediting "standards" and a lot more cross licensing?

Jonathan_Zittrain: I worry that as soon as we're into the zone of cross-licensing -- that's already an L-word that stops molecular motion -- it assumes there's IP [intellectual property] to be licensed to begin with. I'd like to make sure we maintain a hardware infrastructure that allows nerds to come up with new stuff on their own and deploy it to the rest of us -- a safety valve against the more formalized/proprietary systems that will naturally be competing too.

dreamworld: Does anyone in your vision make money on IT anymore? Or does it all become freeware?

Jonathan_Zittrain: Sure -- think how much money the Net and PC have let people make -- largely because the framers of each didn't set out to recoup it all or negotiate to get a slice. This is a classic commons problem, where a little common work can make us all better off and many of us richer, but it's sometimes tough to get firms and people to contribute.

dstevens: Aren't the innovators going to continue to innovate even though the "masses" choose to take the easy way out with appliances? In the K-12 world we (technology support people) are constantly asked to provide technology in the most effective way with little or no thinking involved on the user end. The innovators are several steps ahead of the masses, by the time the masses catch up to the innovators, the innovators are innovating something new.

Jonathan_Zittrain: Yes. The key question is whether those innovators can easily expose the rest of us to what they're doing. The people who did KaZaA and Skype (same people!) didn't need to clear them with anyone -- they just naturally started out with the more daring and techie among us, and they and others then adapted the tech so mainstream users could benefit from it. There are many future tech configurations that won't allow that sort of diffusion to happen. What if the K-12 places had hardware infrastructures where you couldn't just send them a new app to try? Or only browsers, for that matter, configured not to trust sites not on a whitelist.

Nakshatram: And we also have IPs in technology a la Qualcomm! That literally divided the world.

Jonathan_Zittrain: True. That's why I think if we rewound time and played it back again it's not clear we'd be where we are -- imagine if people actually knew what was truly being invented at the time the Net's standards were being developed!