Hi, #1. Agreed, I think now that collective action can be co-ordinated outside of the State model, particularly as the proportion of people who depend on open networking grow. Further, technology improvements are reducing the need for "heavy lifting" and long investment in costly and complex equipment to solve the scaling and last mile problems we have had in the past. #2. Collective co-ordinated action has succeeded in proving more valuable AKA successful, than Kings, priests and all other forms of centralised command and control. Heavy-duty cores lose to light-weight flexible ones. And if property rights are so beneficial in networks, why don't we completely privatise rights of ways in physical space? #3. People always free-ride, OK, but that doesn't mean they free ride in all activities. It is the efficiency of P2P distribution that makes it a problem for command and control incumbents. I believe your democracy depends on freedom of communication. #4. Optimisation of the network for existing applications is the greatest choke-point to innovation we know. I'll leave this to your co-advisor David Isenberg to address. The Next Generation Network (NGN) isn't. Its a network optimised for a triple-play of existing applications. The simple, permissionless network is where innovation occurs. #5. Markets are great. Competitive service provision over shared infrastructure produces cheap infrastructure (no duplication) and cheap customer desired services. As long as the infrastructure remains simple and uncaptured, new services can arise without the control or permission of the operators. Complicating the infrastructure to optimise returns or performance for a narrow range of services is wasteful. As long as the seperation between infrastructure and services is maintained, the infrastructure can be improved by competition and substituted without disruption. #6. Agreed, but moving to one shared generalised infrastructure certainly will. #7. "if there's value to users in collaboration, then a market-driven provider should be able to meet users' needs," but what we are seeing is "if there's value to the users which compromises the revenues of a share-holder driven provider, the provider will impede the users meeting their needs." In closing I'd observe that closed networks can exist within an open one, but the reverse is not possible. There will not be an open Web (or anything else) within a closed network. "There never was and there'll never be a mouse's nest in a cat's ear." Hamish MacEwan http://del.icio.us/Hamish.MacEwan