What about Internet II? Isn't that already an answer to frustration?

Internet II means different things to different people. To the extent that it's just about fast protocols -- and some versions are just that -- I don't see it solving any of the generative problems covered in the book. E.g., viruses and worms could spread that much faster! Other initiatives, like the Stanford Clean Slate Initiative and a project undertaken by Net luminary David Clark at MIT, try to rethink the Net from the ground up -- now that we know how important and central (but not centralized) it is. I've participated in some of the associated meetings and found them fascinating, but they're naturally marred by self-consciousness: it's all about remaking a Net that can be all things to all people while avoiding a bunch of problems we now know to be true, some internal to the Net and some more socially/legally constructed, like IP theft. I haven't seen those knots cut yet and would in the meantime like to buy some more time for our venerable Net and PC platforms.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yea; I devote some of Chapter Eight to saying that patents are out of control. But I mostly cite to all the other scholars who say that with greater depth than I. Most of the book I've tried to make cover new ground, which also means that it's a little uneven -- for example I don't talk all that much about net neutrality, since that debate is already so thoroughly met.

You devote a whole chapter to the future of privacy on the Net, but in the end you seem to assert that consumer privacy will be better protected by MySpace pages, blogs and wikis than more traditional means. Why is that?

Well, I think that privacy is best protected through norms than through trying to make everything into a lawsuit. I acknowledge the very real problems that come up when armies of the world's tourists are producing images and feeding them into Flickr and Facebook stamped with time, date, location, and identity of the people in the photo -- far more intrusive than CCTV here in Britain! So I propose ways to convey social cues along with the raw data of something like a photo. Let Star Wars Kid say early: Hey, I don't approve of this; it was an accident it got online, please forward a cat doing something funny instead of this to your friends... please? How many, if they saw that before forwarding Star Wars Kid onward, would respect those wishes? The answer tells us whether we're ready to govern ourselves and see the Net as the social phenomenon that it is, not just a big pile of stuff to copy and paste.

Do you think the day will ever come when there will be a program that is capable of putting a stop to all hackers or I should say a quick fix?

Nope, no magic bullets, except in the appliance. And that way lies a cauterization of what I think is most valuable about the Net and PC. How do they put it? The price of freedom is eternal vigilance! We just need some new tools to help those who want to help. Some binoculars and walkie-talkies for the Neighborhood Watch.

Would you consider appliances the answer to the prayers of those who run (or advocate) a closed or controlled society?

You bet. The Chinese gov't no doubt loves some of the tools we've developed in that category: car navigation systems with microphones that can be secretly and remotely turned on; DVRs that can have content retroactively excised if it's found to be objectionable.

Your book is somewhat utopian -- proposing answers to the Internet's toughest security problems from the goodwill of the community. Wouldn't a capitalistic approach be more likely to succeed?

Many of the book's approaches are capitalistic in the way that Wikipedia is: Wikipedia rises or falls with its popularity in the market, and it even allows anyone, .com or otherwise, to copy all of its contents. So it passes a market test every day. My book has some public policy ideas and recommendations in it, but most of the interventions I suggest are market ones -- whether by software developers or by consumers.