MIT's open communications campaigner

...a communications system can we build that has as little infrastructure as possible?

How do you think the communications industry will respond to you work? Won't they resist any attempt to make the system more open as this will result in more competitors and a reduction in revenues?
The great open systems you know of in the digital world — the Internet, the PC — were done in a pre-commercial way. People involved in creating the Internet were concerned with making it as open as possible to future innovations, but the communications industry has been economic and regulated from its inception.

But even though that's true, it doesn't mean that communications companies would be averse to what I'm doing. For example, if you think of the pre-Carterfone era — when you couldn't connect anything to the phone network that wasn't built by AT&T. In the pre-Carterfone era AT&T owned everything. After the ruling, it only owned a slice of the pie, but the whole industry grew with the development of answerphones, fax machines, modems and so on.

Wireless and mobile networks are still in the in pre-Carterfone era — the only way you can connect to a mobile network is via a phone provided by your network provider. You can buy the phone, but there are economic disincentives as the provider subsidises the phone.

If you are a communications company, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to open it up — you can gain the benefit of the inventiveness you've enabled. If I can make a cell phone that doesn't need towers — if every phone acts as a tower — this would help the cell phone company as they don't need to pay to build the towers. I'm certainly not on a crusade to eliminate phone companies.

When will your project be completed?
I wish it were easier to answer that question. The program that Nicholas Negroponte [the former chairman of MIT's media lab, who stepped down on Wednesday started — One Laptop Per Child. If you link all these children you would have a pretty fertile network of innovation. You can use mesh networks to get that started.

[The laptops will have wireless broadband that allows them to work as a mesh network — each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbours creating an ad hoc local area network. The project is also exploring ways to connect the laptops to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost, according to an FAQ on the laptops.]

The laptop will initially be distributed to five million children across five countries, but could eventually be distributed to many more. How well do you think such a large mesh network will work?
How well can we make it work? I would like to let them run all the communications they want to do and never run out of steam. Can we make a network so it can grow without bounds? No. Can it do now as well as it will need to do in the end? No. But will the technology probably improve as we go along? Yes. The question is how we can we let it scale.

What are you most excited about in the next few years?
There has been a backlash against technologies, such as the music industry's backlash against digital music. But, I believe that when you start to build an open platform then you will defeat the backlash and society will become empowered. I think society will win eventually.

In the end, laws are supported by society — they don't control society. If you making systems and platforms open, and make them openly available then society will gain and retain their voice. For example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — the act that criminalised things that were civil infractions before — is now being modified and toned down. Legal structures have to support social structures.