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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

As the net becomes overly crowded do you think it will become a pay-as-you-use program?

I hope not -- there's still several billion more people to go. I'd rather they join the Net than, say, mobile telephony networks that do indeed have the pay-as-you-go mentality. That's why current work in ad hoc networking (and projects like one laptop per child that try to have this built in) will be such interesting bellwethers.

So where does IBM's (bought into I forget the name) early entry before AOL stand?

I think IBM and Prodigy teamed up, but I wouldn't swear it. IBM had lots of cash but was hamstrung by being... IBM. Not a lot of whimsy there. Chapter Four of the book pulls together some of the v. interesting literature on this topic, where firms in general are not able to innovate, but individuals can. Eric von Hippel has some great stuff along these lines.

I was surprised by your findings of how appliances can be used by law enforcement -- for example, that the FBI could use OnStar to record conversations in a car or a cell phone could be turned into a microphone. Is this risk well known or understood?

I'm amazed at how little attention cases like TiVo v. EchoStar, and The Company v. The United States, have gotten. They certainly trouble me, and Chapter Five of the book tries to explain how our market choices are, in an uninformed way, leading us to results we will rue.

It seems like we're headed toward a multi-tiered Internet. For corporate users the company locks their environment down. For home/independent users the less tech-savvy adopt appliances/closed systems while more tech-savvy stick with PCs and "open" systems.

Yes, plausible and I'd count that as a very bad outcome. That's a future we should want to stop.