Moderator-Julie: Pre-submitted question: What do you think should be done to mitigate the risk of law enforcement or regulators taking advantage of new features that allow spying and whatnot? 

Jonathan_Zittrain: I think the well-informed public can stay away from them in the absence of privacy guarantees. There's a reason that the company in The Company v. The United States wanted to remain anonymous as it challenged the FBI's demand to use its car communications system to eavesdrop on passengers! Also, I think we can and should develop legal frameworks to protect personal data stored in cloud computing configurations as much as we would personal data on a laptop.

ptrawles: I see your point about the risk this poses to innovation. However, doesn't it inherently add value to the Internet when more people are available? If getting grandma online via an appliance allows her to e-mail the kids then there is good done. If grandma was likely to create or try bleeding-edge software this could hurt, but my parents at least are not going to come close (and as their tech support for that I'm thankful). I do think that the stratification is inevitable and has already been set in the Linux vs. Windows market segmentation. There is so much more innovation coming from the Linux front. Once again, however, I don't see Linux ever truly taking out Windows on the desktop due to the cost of retraining. As you mention if we had it do over again we likely wouldn't be where we are - I've no idea of whether we'd be better or worse, but we wouldn't be here.

Jonathan_Zittrain: Yes, I'll be interested to see if GNU/Linux can take off on the desktop, e.g. ubuntu. And I take your point that grandma on an appliance is better than no grandma at all! I don't begrudge the appliances -- I just want to see what we'd call a critical mass of generative PCs (and successors) still in the mix. Maybe even enough for grandma to want one -- since don't we want to be able to Skype with her without waiting for it to become an "approved" app through a partnership with the appliance vendor?

ptrawles: One of the things I'm most concerned about is the sheer folly of many patent filings. The "smartphone" patent and subsequent lawsuits are going to kill innovation just as fast as closed systems. Once the Internet became a moneymaking opportunity the game was afoot and will inevitably be hampered by the lawyers.