 So the topic that we're going to explore in this next hour is a concept called interoperability. And the purpose of our research project in this area, which is a book forthcoming next year, is to delve into something that in the internet law and policy space is almost always taken as a good thing. It's a little like Apple Pie in America. People say we want more interoperability. We want systems that work together more rather than less. And we think that's basically true. We think that statement is true after lots of research and lots of ways as we'll get to. We also think it's a little more complicated than that. And that there are a bunch of really interesting questions about why interoperability matters. What are the purposes for interoperability? How we get there? And what some of the adverse effects of highly interoperable systems might be. And then how we might think about mitigating some of the downsides of high levels of interoperability. And what we're going to do is to take you through a series of 10 claims, 10 strong statements about interoperability using some examples as we go. And partly we're looking at historical examples running from the train tracks that have come together at the same gauge level over the course of history and currency and so forth. Things that touch on globalization and otherwise in the past iLaw segments through to the architectures of the future. Things like cloud computing, the internet of things, the smart grid, and the health care system, all of which rely upon high levels of interoperability going forward and where we think there's an opportunity in law and policy to think through what exactly we mean when we say we want interoperability in these architectures of the future. And though we have an argument that we're going to make, an arc over the course of this hour, we hugely encourage people to interrupt as we go. This is highly interruptable interop conversation and in particular students who may have felt they have not yet had chances. This is an opportunity and a warm welcome from the faculty at the front of the room to jump in and argue with us. We also have at least two students who have worked on relevant projects. Matthew Becker is one of the research assistants who has written some wonderful pieces that have gone into the book and our standalone case studies. Sonya McNeil has written a wonderful piece on the smart grid, not part of our research, but which talks about the privacy implications of a highly interoperable smart grid. So in particular, Matthew and Sonya, I hope you'll jump in and I may call on you if not. But others please do as we go and we will adhere to the five vote rule. So if you have something that you want to interrupt, go through the question tool as well. With that, Professor Dr. Gasser, you're on. Thank you, John. So welcome also from my side. Good morning or good afternoon. Just to add to John's opening remarks, I think the topic of interoperability hopefully also provides a different angle or a different way to think about some of the core themes we discussed over the course of the week. There will be a couple of statements as you will see that for instance, touch up on the question, what is the role of governments when enabling innovation and also what are some of the limitations and the price that we have to pay for increased interconnectedness. So to a certain extent, this session even links back to what you just heard from Jonathan, where we see some of the downsides of openness and increased almost unlimited interconnectedness. So while we have been celebrating over the course of the week, openness of the internet and talked a lot about the great things that come from this openness, I think interoperability is almost the question, the challenge of this concept and notion of openness in the sense of be precise about how much openness and openness with what kind of safeguards to have in place to foster the great things that the web brings along but also to address and be responsible and responsive to some of the challenges we just heard about in this and previous sessions including the one on privacy. So let me start with the first statement. As John mentioned, we have studied over the past five or six years now, many case studies, a very diverse set of case studies actually and looked into the question when things become interoperable in simple terms, when things start to work together, what are the effects on innovation and competition in particular? So we looked at case studies such as online music systems, we looked at case studies such as barcodes and products or we looked into shipping containers and many other cases where interoperability plays a key role across different industries but of course particularly we focused on information and communication technologies. Based on these case studies we've concluded actually that interop is generally desirable because it can lead and often leads to innovation, competition, consumer choice and systemic efficiencies. Now the problem with our research was and this links a little bit back to the methodology section too that it's largely based on a case studies approach. We haven't found really hard large scale empirical evidence to support this claim but plenty of anecdotal evidence and plenty of case studies where we see this positive relationship between increased levels of interoperability and more innovation. Now fortunately for our argument and claim here we have found support in economic theory for this claim that more interoperability is good for competition and innovation because more interoperability reduces market entry barriers and lock ins which in turn leads to more innovation and I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to illustrate that also by looking at some of the really controversial legal cases of the past few decades including the Microsoft case and Ann Marie and Phil will help us to understand these cases a little bit better. A second reason outside of the standard economic theory of course was also coming up in ILO when Eric van Hipple together with Terry Fisher presented the power of user innovation and many of the examples they have shown in their session are also based on this very idea of interoperability which I will talk about more in a second what it actually means. So we have plenty of support from theory also from this kind of new body of research on user created innovation. Now a great example for this play between more interop and more innovation of course are web mashups which are powered by open APIs which essentially allow anyone to access the data or services of a particular platform. Twitter and Facebook are great illustrations here and again we can go in some more depth during discussion. When Facebook opened up its interfaces we've seen a search of 4,000 third party applications that were created within only six months and the most popular applications were actually games. Now this was also shown in the course of ILO Ushahidi as a crisis mapping tool and this is another great illustration of the power of increased interoperability. Increased interoperability is not only good for technical innovations and that seems to be a very important point but also for upper level innovations including process and even human innovation. Ushahidi as you may recall was used in various contexts to support disaster relief efforts for instance in the aftermath of the earthquake or the crisis in Japan. So Ushahidi here again builds as you recall on a set of maps from Google and elsewhere from various sources and lets users and first responders map onto these maps incidents but also map their relief efforts and let them and organizations help coordinate their efforts. So you can see how lower levels of interoperability the technology- We have a quick anonymous question from Doc. He's asking if there's a one word opposite of interoperability. Some answers we already have are proprietary system and non-interoperable. Yeah. I prefer non-interoperable as the opposite word but we will talk a little bit more about that in a second because one of the claims we make is that the interop is not a black and white thing but comes along a spectrum but John you may want to win. I'm only gonna admit to the fact that I typed in the non-interoperable answer in there as anonymous. Ah, thank you. At least you're on the same page, I love it. All right, so there is another aspect to this relationship between increased interop and innovation and that has less to do with the power of more interoperability to create new things and new applications and services but actually that more interop can help the adoption of existing innovations. The transition from analog to digital TV in the US is a great example. It's a long story, I'll keep it very short but here the government basically stepped in to encourage and allow households to buy converter boxes to the people actually so that people could buy converter boxes who didn't want to buy new TV sets to receive the digital signals and these converter boxes allowed the users basically to receive digital signals but transfer them in a way that they can still watch TV on their old analog TV sets. Now this is kind of an interoperability fix so on the one hand side of digital signals here we have analog TVs, converter boxes help to create interoperability which then actually led to the adoption of this new technology called digital TV which was kind of a hack or a fix to overcome a particular lock in, a technological lock in so that's a version, a variation on the theme of interoperability is good for innovation. As I already mentioned, second basic observation coming out of these case studies is that interrupt comes in different degrees it's not the black and white characteristics and also happens at various levels, technology layer, data layer but also the human and institutional layer. Just a few very quick examples here John mentioned it in the beginning. Technological interoperability means that systems per se can connect to one another often through an explicit agreed upon interface. We have here the example of the golden spike that connected the first transcontinental railroads from the west coast and east coast in the US in 1869. We have a great case study on this railway and gauges interoperability. Now translate that into the digital edge if you take USB stick and can, which you can plug into your computer. Obviously these are very basic technological approaches to interoperability. Now closely related with this technological layer of interoperability is data layer interoperability. Email is again a very straightforward example we can use for instance our private gmail account and communicate with Scott who may use Outlook I doubt should have taken someone else. But anyway take any other or a Mac for that matter email program whatever your choice is and still we can communicate with each other, read each other's emails although we use the different applications running on our machines. Importantly interoperability has not only these technological notions but also has a deeply human side, a deeply human component and language seems to be the key example of interoperability phenomenon that we can talk to each other even if we have different mother tongues and use different languages. A great example of interoperability in that sense that was actually created in a long process is air traffic control. Air traffic control of course controllers as you all know use English but it has taken much longer than one would think to agree on English as the standard and moreover it's not just plain English it's kind of a standard and simplified version of English that is used in air traffic. And this was a real interoperable problem in the sense that many of the air accidents were based on miscommunications among airline pilots and misunderstanding between pilots and air traffic controllers. So to agree on a simplified, standardized English language again was kind of a step towards more interoperability that obviously also illustrates the human component not only by the pilots using the language but also that interop can be a part of the process a matter of life and death ultimately because obviously when you're in an air traffic accident then you have a really human tragedy going on most of the cases. On top of these levels layers of technical data and human interoperability we have something what we call institutional or organizational interoperability. And here emergency communication is a great example and we have described in one of our case studies we have looked at have taken 9-11 as an example and first responders. So really interesting to see how not only police forces and firefighters and other first responders use different coded language to communicate with each other. So especially if you were back there were kind of like if you'd say we have a 214 here and that may mean an officer down or it may mean we need additional equipment depending on what part of the organization you were whether you were a police officer or a firefighter so there were interoperability problems in this language sense that I just mentioned but there was also an institutional problem with it that even if police force and firefighter spoke the same language they didn't listen to each other because they had different jurisdictions and different cultures, organizational cultures. So there is also this institutional sense of interoperability that can be a huge challenge to overcome and to be addressed. The dramatic consequence in this 9-11 context was that firefighters in one of the towers who tried to save people were listening on the radio to the police helicopters that watched that the towers get unstable and would soon collapse but didn't follow the evacuation order by the police from the helicopters because they said we are firefighters we have a different jurisdiction and we can do that and didn't follow what the colleagues in the helicopters suggested. So these are a couple of examples here but here I would like to turn over to you John after I praised interrupt to a certain extent it's up to you now to add nuance by explaining our next claim. Thank you. So I think the basic claim that interrupt is a good thing is a crucial starting point but it's also I think important to think about in what instances particularly from a law and policy perspective might we have concerns about high levels of interoperability. I think one of the core claims we're making is there's not a maximal level of interoperability that's always a good thing but in fact an optimal level of interoperability that is often a good thing and so a couple of examples of that. I think privacy is probably the easiest example and there are two very similar cases that have come up recently that demonstrate this. So one that actually involved a Harvard Law School story. So Professor Rubenstein, Bill Rubenstein brought a class action against the Google Corporation in the Buzz case. Were there any students in the room who actually worked on that case or were say named plaintiffs in that case? I think it's a great kind of local story but the basic idea was that in response to Twitter and its rise, Google thought that it would introduce a product that would link up various aspects of our identity in such a way as to allow for a sort of Twitter killing application to emerge connected to Gmail and the contacts. And what happened was that they created a level of interoperability and generally speaking we think the consumers like higher levels of interoperability, the web itself, email, mobile applications make this case. But in this particular case, the plaintiffs claimed that they did it without asking whether or not you really wanted information in your contact space to be something that connected up to this new product. The net result was a class action. lawsuit Google admitted no wrongdoing but I think paid up something like $8.5 million for having done it. I think the Facebook beacon case makes a similar point and actually ended up with a remarkably similar outcome in law which is to say that they decided briefly that if you bought something in a context outside of Facebook itself, in this case at a company like Overstock, that the fact of having purchased something in Overstock would show up in your Facebook profile on the wall. The obvious sort of jokie claims were what if a lover bought something for that person's partner who wasn't married to that person and it shows up on the wall and then the husband or wife sees it, that's the sort of trivial example. But I think the more fundamental one was one could make an argument, this is greater levels of interoperability between services and that we generally think this is a good thing but that it introduced a concern in this particular context which was obviously was done for the gain of Facebook. They were trying to make money from this exchange of information and it violated one of the things that we know about privacy which is it's very context specific. That people share some information in one place that they don't expect to be shared in another and I think higher levels of interoperability if we rush to them willy-nilly can have that effect. Sonya, I don't know if you'd be willing, if I can call on you to make this case in the context of the smart grid as well. Sonya's been doing some really terrific independent research, she has a note coming out from Jolt I believe that looks at the emergence of the smart grid. Maybe if you tell a little bit of the story of the smart grid, how it's emerging and why it might be presenting similar kinds of interop related privacy issues. Thanks. One of the themes that we've been returning to in iLaw is the theme of our world as being digital. But our digital world is powered by an electric grid that actually predates the microprocessor. This leads to all sorts of problems. The grid is insecure, it's unreliable and to address these problems as well as to make greater environmental conservation possible and to create jobs. There's been a transition from our old analog grid to a more mature digital smart grid. The data that is possible to ascertain about an individual based on their energy consumption in a smart grid system is pretty different than what we're used to seeing in an analog system. As meters become more advanced, it's possible to determine with more granularity not only how much power people are using but in what ways they're using it. Part of this is driven by appliances that will become interoperable with the electric grid and appliances draw power in slightly different ways. So the upshot to make a long story short is that we can learn a lot more about the life of the inside of the home based on how power is being used. Certain medical devices, for example, draw power in different ways than your refrigerator does. And this information is useful to all sorts of people, whether it's marketers or law enforcement. So it's an example of a technology that really cuts both ways and interoperability is a big piece of that. Great, so just to follow up with one further question which is, so we want a smart grid on some level because it will help with climate change, right? It will allow us to allocate more efficiently the energy resources that we have. We think there are a variety of reasons why consumers may like it but under current United States law, would you argue that we're sufficiently protective of consumer interest for a smart grid or do you think there actually is a need for some kind of judicial interpretation of the Fourth Amendment or change within federal law as a matter of legislation that would in fact help protect us in this more interoperable smart grid growth? Well, likely the last two minutes I'll say it depends, right? It depends on what our goals are. I think that this data is very useful from a social science standpoint but because it's also very revealing from a privacy standpoint there's a real question about whether or not the Fourth Amendment to take one example would adequately provide protection. At this point it doesn't seem that law enforcement would be able to get access to this information directly by conducting surveillance rather than by going and asking your utility provider to turnover records ex post. And that makes a pretty big difference from the Fourth Amendment point of view. I think that the discussion has been remarkably robust actually in the private sector about whether or not utilities can share or sell or store this type of information and how long they should be permitted to do it but the law enforcement piece of it has largely been missing. I think that part of the, well from a privacy standpoint, from a consumer protection standpoint, part of this is that it's not clear that consumers will be able to opt out of the smart grid or at least if they are initially as the grid transforms and older meters are not interoperable with a new grid that opt out will at some point become ineffective. And I think that to ensure consumer trust during the deployment of this technology, which we really do need, that privacy protections need to be a part of the discussion. Excellent, thank you. And I commend to all law students and all law faculty to read Sonya's piece when it comes out in Jolt, which makes in fact some even more specific claims about the possible responses in law to the situation. So thank you. There's also I think in addition to privacy concerns, I won't linger on them here, but a related set of security claims. I think this topic links up to Jonathan's cybersecurity arguments of yesterday. And I think the basic idea of making more connected our series of systems and lives of these various levels presents the possibility of the flow of data from one place to another in ways that may add to vulnerabilities. Scott, I don't know if you're willing to put on the spot here for how higher levels of interoperability might or might not present security challenges, but I think we really have a bold call here on it. Well, the canonical example is the single monoculture of most corporate PCs, that almost all of corporate America uses Macintosh, Windows PCs, I wish, but either way, the problem is still there, which means just like with a field of corn using a single strand of genotype, a particular disease, virus, whatever, can wipe out the entire corporate eco structure just because they are compatible. They're all the same, they're alternative interoperability because they're the same device. That can be extremely, extremely serious. And in general, the fact that you have the same set of technology, the same set of standards that are used for all different types of interaction. You mentioned email. That's a set of standards that's used by everybody. And if you have a way to transfer bad stuff to use the technical term, it will work just fine with all platforms. Can I push you one bit more, Scott, though, in this topic? One of the distinctions that we draw in this book is to say that interoperability isn't always standardization in the sense that there are ways for things to be interoperable and not be exactly the same. Do you agree with this general statement and how might that play out in the context of your last response? Interoperability comes from standards as one flavor of it. It's certainly the most common flavor of it in the internet. We have a set of standards that develop by the Internet Engineering Task Force, which defines all of the fundamental things, including routing protocols and email, et cetera. And you may or may not have had a hand in the development of some of those. A little bit. Google, Scott, Bradner, and ICF, you'll get some answers. But it's a de facto interoperability that comes from people just, developers just wanting to be able to communicate. A perfect example of that is the instant messaging. Used to be that instant messaging was completely siloed. If you were on AOL, you can only instant message to AOL. There's no way to interoperate. But that just, there wasn't a standards effort to overcome that. There was just people working reverse engineering and getting through that. Until jabber when there, in fact, was a standards effort. There was a standard it didn't take. But, and this goes all the way back to the original CompuServe, which refused to interconnect with the internet until some third parties, people who just wanted to do that communication set it up themselves by reverse engineering. Very helpful, thank you. Always turning to Scott Bradner, results in shedding some light on issues. There are two important points about interoperability that are buried in what Scott said. One is interoperability doesn't mean only adopting exactly the same protocol or the standard. There are lots of ways to do it. I think one way to think about it, in a sense, is actually the notion of currency. The fact that you can have lots of different currencies, in fact, the Swiss franc coexist with the euro even within the European zone, which can be traded back and forth. They don't all have to be the same thing. And yet the system might be made to work together. And I think that's, you can have a very high level where everybody does have the same, but you can also have important degrees. The other one is to make the claim that I don't blame, we don't blame interoperability for these privacy and security concerns. Or that some of the other concerns like sameness, where everything comes to the same. The problem is, in fact, somewhat higher in the stack in a way. I think you might make the argument that you want the technologies and the data to be able to flow. You just want rules at higher levels that block the flow in certain circumstances. So from the security and the privacy perspective, the point was not that it was a problem that Google had made technologies that went together. It was the fact the way in which they rolled it out or the way in which they told people about it. Likewise with Facebook, there might be contexts in which it's great to have that interoperability, but we need rules higher in the stack to do it. So the problem is not interoperability per se, but rather an implementation question on how we need law or rules of various sorts to come in after them. And Scott pushes us really to this next key point. The fourth of our claims about interoperability, which is to say there's no one optimal way to get there. I think that Scott really heated up effectively saying that a single firm can create interoperability on its own. So one single firm could create a series of products, in this case, take Microsoft or Apple or Google, all of which have highly vertically interoperable technologies within their own stack, which effectively work together. That may be a very limited form of interoperability, just to do it as a single firm, but it is possible to do it that way. Two firms can work together, Microsoft working with Novell as an example, a famous one where former competitors work together, particularly in the business context that come together. The most prominent example through the field of information communication technologies is standards processes. And within that, there are also a broad range of approaches that one could take. There can be very open standards processes and there can be quite closed standards processes. And there are a variety of reasons why you want this in different cases. Scott, go ahead. Adding one more nuance, which is you can have applied interoperability by gatewaying. So you can have two non-interoperable systems, but something that talks to each of them and transfers between them. Exactly. I take that to be Urs's case in the digital TV context. There are lots of instances where you might have sort of hacks at some point that make a certain level of interoperability come about. May or may not be optimal again. Maybe it's about to develop. By definition, any type of translation introduces error. Right. All right, fair enough. So you may not want that particular kind of a hack, but it is a mode to get there. We've introduced this framework that you can see on the screen here from ranging on one hand from the lateral approaches down to the most collaborative. And I think it's also important to look at another axis. Series of regulatory versus non-regulatory types of approaches. So interoperability is something that often prompted by consumers happens because firms seem to make it so. It might be used by the web itself, simply that non-firm actors outside the firm context seek to work together and come to a level of interoperability. And I think particularly the web and email and some of the core systems have come about in those modes. But I think it's also very important to note that the state has an important role here in creating interoperability at different levels and at different times. So in one instance, in a sort of legal realism sense, of course the background law that exists is crucial to the fact that interoperability comes about in many instances. There also may be instances in which the state intervenes at some point in the process. There are a series of ex ante as well as ex post ways in which the state might get involved. Of course, mentioned the example of emergency communications, there's a series of rules related to transportation, for instance, that the state will mandate up front. The fact that we need to be interoperable, we need to use a certain language in order to ensure that boats, for instance, can travel the waters together. That's an instance in which the market isn't coming forward with those rules, but the state mandates them up front. And in certain instances like that, it may make very good sense from a policy perspective to do that. There are lots of instances where along the way the state will jump in one way or the other or emphasize the healthcare example. Right now, in the context of healthcare reform, one of the very important topics is, can we make electronic medical records about us in fact work together to talk together? Now almost dozens of states have tried, in different ways, to come up with interoperable medical records in the effort to get to healthcare reform in a more efficient system. And nobody has succeeded. The fact that there are very low levels of interoperability among electronic medical records, including in places like Britain, there's billions of pounds to accomplish it, this is another area where in fact the state involvement, the Obama administration in the United States, I think is a good example of this, where they've stepped up and said in fact we are going to play a larger role. We're a procurer of these technologies, so we're going to demand a higher level of interoperability through our procurement power systems. Or as a convener, I think the example of a smart grid, a regulated industry that Sonya talked about may be another example where the state may have a role in that way. And then last, the state may have a role at post. Obviously the kinds of tools like competition law in European terms and interest in United States terms are often blunt instruments, they often come after the fact. But it may well be that the United States or the European Union or others may need to jump in after the fact, to make a claim that the way in which market actors played in a particular context resulted in two low levels of interoperability. There's a very complicated interest in story about Microsoft in this particular case. Every level of Microsoft is here in fact. If you track the corporate history of Microsoft, you can see in fact some of the effects of different strategies of interoperability that we can get into in some detail. We heard earlier in my law a little call where I take an implied call between Jonathan and Yochai about how open Microsoft's initial systems were. But I think there's an argument to say that the Microsoft operating system from the start was a highly interoperable one in the sense that you could write that ESE type files to run on the operating system Microsoft. You then get to a period where clearly Microsoft in the context of a case that was actually brought by our colleague Phil Malone here on behalf of the United States was deemed to have made systems not sufficiently interoperable. That there was a period in the antitrust case context where the effect that the claim was and ultimately resulted in losses both in the United States and Europe that they're not sufficiently interoperable in these ways. And I would argue that the approach that Microsoft is taking out of cloud computing is more a return to the roots of the company's initial interoperability approach where they in fact are seeking lots of ways in which to make their systems more interoperable than that original. So I think it's a very good question to say what is the role of the state versus the role of the firm in having created this trajectory with the Microsoft who are within any number of companies towards greater levels of interoperability. Does anybody want to pause on that topic since I went through a lot of important history very quickly? Scott, I hear. To refer people to the AOL Time Warner merger, one of the issues in that was compatibility of instant messaging and the FTC forced AOL to agree to come up with compatible, interoperable instant messaging. So that's a role of the state. Exactly. So the IM wars I think over the course of about a decade are another very good example. You do see the rise of an open standard in the case of Jabra and I guess it's XMLL that emerges from that sets of one open approach to try to make it happen. You also see the FTC intervening. The FTC ends up backing off a little bit later in that particular case. So it's an example of the government I think probably across administrations having slightly different views about how interventionist to be. But I think the IM example is a very strong one. I don't know, Phil or Emery, we have any interest in jumping in on that relatively quick tour I took? I mean, I think you captured it pretty well. The European case in particular was focused in one half very much on whether or not Microsoft was allowing interoperability by rival server manufacturers with the Microsoft monopoly desktop operating system. The theory was that by limiting interoperability, by making Microsoft servers work particularly well with the desktop and not allowing other servers to do that by sort of hiding the secret sauce, if you will, that you needed for real interoperability, that was hurting competition and ultimately hurting innovation and customer choice in the market. And the solution the Europeans came up with was forced disclosure, forced licensing of protocols that would allow this sort of interoperability. Big debates about whether that was the right thing to do, whether it really was causing the problems, but that was the core of their theory. Yeah, and John, I guess I would just say, I think you are right to say that one of the outcomes of the Antitrust case was we did kind of return to our roots and recognize that there was value in being more interoperable and less controlling. It was just a few years ago that I think Brett Smith stood in this room and said, Phil, you were hosting the 10th anniversary of the Microsoft Antitrust case and all the players were back together and honestly the Microsoft people were a little nervous like it was just gonna get bashed all over again and I just remember Brad standing up and saying, you know what, you guys won, it was a good thing that you won and we've learned a lot, we're a different company than we were and it was incredibly painful and in fact we're finally out from under that consent decree but in the end it was a really good thing just for us, for consumers and for the industry. So thanks, Phil. Give a lot of credit to Brad Smith and you and others for showing up for that 10th anniversary of this lawsuit. That was one of those invitations we weren't sure it was gonna get accepted but Sonya, go ahead. I just wanted to add a small point about the role of human and institutional interoperability and governance and standard setting, particularly in the smart grid context. I think one of the real challenges have been that there's just so many people who are involved in the effort to discuss and then to flesh out the either ex ante or ex post standards. You have everyone from state public utilities commissions to various professional organizations to the Department of Energy and other actors. So interoperability at the technical level really gets translated in a lot of different ways and all of these different sorts of interoperability have to themselves work successfully together I think in order to find a solution. It's a great point and actually I think it makes two very important points about interoperability. One is that there may be a leadership role for the state or others to step forward and make sure that the right people are in the room. The other is that there's a huge literature around the standards development process and one of the claims around open standards processes is that they include more transparency of who the players are and so forth. It's a very important intersection too here to intellectual property law and the effect of having patents and other things that you have to check at the door and certain standards, settings and you're required then subsequently to license. So those are the reasons why a standards process may be optimal in some cases to get to interrupt. I'm gonna hit one more thing and then I turn back to you. Some of the means I think as we just noted are better than others. The open standards approach I think is very important to that. But I think it's also important to think about the problem not just of interoperability on day one but the problem of interoperability over time. I'm gonna tie this to the discussion of digital humanities and of libraries from yesterday. One of the things I worry a lot about having some responsibility for libraries here at Harvard is that when we acquire or digitize something in a certain format, are we in fact doing something that will have a relatively short lifespan relative to the length of time that say a book. We have these wonderful 13th century manuscripts copies of the Magna Carta that persist in our library and to the extent that we are acting in such a way today that will not have that same level of persistence over time. And actually I think one of the answers to this is in fact to think about this as an interoperability problem. It's not an end all of the entire solution but to the extent that we make a commitment that when you create a certain file in a certain file format and you think about the possibility associated for instance with virtualization, the ability to run a variety of things on the same machine, that interoperability over time may in fact be one of the ways to address this preservation of knowledge. Now whether or not you need to have a state actor coming in and say you must make things backward compatible over time versus whether or not the marketplace has a reason to do that. I think that's an open question but I think that the notion of thinking about interoperability not just on day one but over a period of time is a crucial part to the story. Thank you John. So the next couple of slides are actually more or less highlighting and summarizing what John already covered. I'd just like to add to the earlier chart that you've seen with the different types or means how to achieve interoperability that the real challenge at least from my boring standpoint as a researcher is to figuring out what is the what's the perfect match or the best possible match between a given tool in the toolbox and you've seen several of them and a particular interoperability problem. And that's not again not a question that you can easily answer because you have to, it's really a data problem. We don't have that many well documented interop stories yet where we can based on these a review of these cases draw firm conclusions which is the best tool to use to solve a given problem. And that's a methodological and a research challenge. Before you get into this, we do have a quick question clarifying the distinction essentially between translation and interoperability. A while back John, you'd use the currency metaphor to address reconciling interoperability and diversity. And I think there's just, we'd like some discussion of the difference between those two concepts. In fact, it's teed up through the euros to Swiss francs which I think is a perfectly good example for the Swiss guy to answer. I suspect the Matt who has jumped in on this maybe Matt Becker so maybe we can also end up throwing it to Matt partway through too. Sure Matt, do you want to take this? So I actually, I wasn't directly involved in the Euro one, but I think translation is certainly a form of interoperability. It's really how things can work together. So it would be translation I guess is similar to this kind of black box in the middle type thing where you have a currency converter who acts as the individual who will take your Swiss francs and transfer them to euros. Certainly when you have an issue such as the financial crisis where this has come apart that shows the limits of this particular method of interoperability. Another, of course, kind of translation is up there in the corner with blocks just kind of the equivalent in the physical world. I think that the basic question why is translation also an interop tool is of course much depends how you define interoperability. If you define interoperability as the ability to transfer and render information across systems then you can see how this currency example is actually within the zone of interoperability tools. Now one of the hardest questions actually and John mentioned that already that we run into and this is certainly also the most controversial one is generally speaking how to best achieve interoperability with regard to the question shall we leave it to the private sector is a less fair approach which I'm a little reluctant to accept as European of course at the right way to go or shall we use the heavy hand as word and intervene with ex ante regulation and laws to achieve interoperability. So I think where we ended up based on the review of the case studies we've written is in most of the cases interop is actually best achieved by the private sector through private sector cooperation in particular which doesn't mean and we'll come back to that and John covered it already which doesn't mean of course that the government doesn't play an important role especially ex ante. One of the great case studies in this context is online music and online entertainment content in particular the example of digital rights management. Johnston has mentioned digital rights management systems already quite a bit. It's a rich example if you trace it back because as you may recall digital rights management was kind of a response to Napster ultimately symbolically speaking where suddenly music was available and shared over the web got out of control in terms of the business model that was developed by the industry originally and so the industry not only launched lawsuits as we've heard but also tried to put things back into the bottle by wrapping digital content and securing digital content through digital rights management systems. Now lawmakers have then pushed or the industry has pushed lawmakers to enact so-called anti-circumvention laws that will protect digital rights management systems because of course hackers immediately found ways around these technological protection layers and that led also to what I mentioned yesterday to the Ypo-Internet Redescent the anti-circumvention provisions in there that then later on were translated back into US law in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now there's been a lot of back and forth France in an interesting response to all that enacted a law so again the government stepping in to say well but DRM is bad because essentially it prevents interoperability we now have this powerful online music provider iTunes of course and Apple coming to France and our French music stores have a difficulty to compete due to strong network effects against or compete with Apple. So what can we do? Governments said we need to force Apple and providers alike to open up and disclose interoperability information which allows competitors then to build interoperable devices like iPods but the French version right and music stores. Now of course on the other hand side the market in online music has developed as well and as you all know over time the music industry got more experimental driven by consumer demand and started to offer DRM free music even in the US and elsewhere. Now in the meantime DRM free music is almost the standard also it comes at a higher price in many instances but has solved interoperability through market forces. Now this is a great case study where you see how difficult it is to time the relevant intervention once the government decides it's time it's a good idea to intervene in a market still open the question what is the appropriate timing so it's a really difficult question how much government intervention and at what points in time to be effective of course the French intervention is not so relevant any more given free DRM offerings on the market. Now another angle or kind of foot just as a footnote to this story is that recently a new initiative has been launched and Anne-Marie sorry to put you on spot again probably you can tell us a little bit about ultraviolet and what is behind that since Microsoft played an important role. Actually I can't. All right, all right. You can tell me yours. Okay so ultraviolet is a consortium among 60 ISPs hardware consumer electronics provider but also software companies that have come together especially with focus on movies where DRM still plays an important role and games and decided look we need to find a more open system of distribution of content that feels more like what the kids experience on peer to peer well still have certain safeguards in place. So this is a industry consortium with Disney and others aboard. The one that is not part of it is Apple which allows you to register as a user and share content across media types with six households, sorry with six members of the household can also be friends and almost experience limitless file sharing within that group of people. So to mimic in a way the file sharing experience that you had online but still using DRM protected content. So this is kind of another illustration of the market trying to find the right balance and right degree of interoperability. We mentioned Microsoft as a counter example where many of us would agree of course that government intervention was much needed maybe in contrast to this French episode that I just mentioned. All this is just to say it's really not an easy question to answer how much government involvement and when. I will be very brief on this one that John has covered that of course the law should also be used as a means to foster interoperability where possible and in particular to address some of the new problems that emerge once we have a more interoperable ecosystem the Google bus case, the healthcare case you mentioned are all great examples where the government involvement is desirable from a normative viewpoint at least from where we stand. John also mentioned already that the law obviously has different or lawmakers have different instruments in the toolbox to foster interoperability. We've also seen it on this map and the distinction also that Sonia made between ex ante and exposed tools is helpful. Exposed tools of course mostly competition law and Phil maybe this is a question for you. How do you think about the power of exposed intervention when it comes to interoperability? How efficient is this tool? How costly is this tool? What are the benefits and drawbacks? Yeah I mean John described it as a very blunt instrument and I think it is. It's always much harder to come along after the fact when an industry has developed products, services have developed, consumer expectations have been set and try to undo things and to the extent that for example the European Union action against Microsoft hasn't necessarily resulted in a big explosion of competition in the server space. One argument is the Europeans argument is that it came too late. So much was already locked in place. These are market subject to network effects where things tip and it's really hard to undo that. So I think after the fact government intervention is the least desirable. It's often much better than nothing and again in the case of the US Microsoft case limited as the final outcome was. I think it still made a big difference both in the specific sense as well as in the broader corporate culture sense that Ann Marie talked about. I think it's far better to create more carrot versus stick positive opportunities up front to spur interoperability and yet there is a concern and I go back to your French legislation in the Apple situation for a second. You know Apple's position and I think not an unreasonable one is that it was their closed system. It was their non interoperable music store system in the first instance that did what no one else had been able to do. You remember the studios tried, lots of people tried to come up with an effective online music sales system as opposed to just file sharing and failed. It just didn't happen. It was finally Apple that had the model that did it and they were able to succeed in part because it wasn't interoperable and it was able to offer the studios enough certainty about DRM and not losing track of their stuff that they would go along and license it. And Apple has a pretty good argument that if the government had stepped in much earlier if the French or the US had said at the very beginning, no, no, no, you can't do it this way. You have to make it interoperable. Then it would never have worked. It would have killed that innovation. So there's always this flip side of government intervention too early, perhaps chilling an innovative model that is necessary. Maybe even some of the lack of interoperability is necessary to succeed in the market. It's very helpful. Thank you, Phil. It also is a good reminder that I actually didn't mention one of the important wrinkles to this competition law interop, or competition and interop relationship that of course there is also strand within economic theory that suggests that it's not always good to foster innovation by having too much competition. So we have heard about Schumpeter and his theory of competition in the lecture of Eric von Hippel and of course there are arguments to be made if you compete for the entire market and not only for a market share that you have stronger incentives to innovate that this is an excellent illustration here. Just to end here and then we open up I think quickly is as far as ex ante approaches are concerned, it's important that this doesn't necessarily mean imposing standards or mandating standards. Of course, as John already said, again the repertoire of governments is more nuanced. Cloud computing is a great example here in the US. Vivek Kundra was with us earlier this week who used the purchasing power of governments to create a more interoperable computing environment through the cloud computing initiative. Regulation by threat, there is an interesting case study coming from Europe about cell phone charges that I encourage you to look into where it was sufficient that the government threatened to mandate the standard to get the industry players together and working something out that we don't produce 51,000 tons of waste with redundant cell phone charges in a year. I think the slide I want to end with is the following, the bi-directional relationship between interoperability and the law. So we talk now a little bit about the ways in which law can be used to increase interoperability. But there is also an interoperability problem within law itself and that ties back to the session on jurisdiction we had yesterday. We've seen how non-interoperable laws can cause a lot of problem for online business and there is an argument to be made that part of these interoperability layers that we discussed include a legal layer and that we as lawyers and legal scholars and of course policy and law makers also have to think about how can we increase the interoperability of our own national legal systems, China being a great example here where again, one area at least where interoperability has been increased legal interoperability, the case of the WTO accession actually increased competition and innovation within the country as various studies indicate. So I think we end here, John, do you want to cover? No, I think the final point is only that this is a really good time to think about what optimal interoperability looks like and how we get there, particularly in the context of highly complex systems that are emergent. So I think we have extremely good examples like the web itself, like email and so forth which are generative platforms that they allow for the kinds of cooperation and firm and non-firm innovation that we've seen broadly. We've also seen a history where more and more systems have been built that are less interoperable in various ways and I think particularly as we look at the emergence of cloud computing of Internet of Things, of the healthcare record, the smart grid, these are moments where interoperability by design will matter a great deal and thinking about how a range of different actors work together to get us to optimality and then to get to a way in which we can keep that interoperability optimal over time not to get locked in, like with the air traffic control system or the example that Doc just sent around by the back channel, the plug system where people get locked into non-interoperable systems over time. So maybe we'll end there and if we can take the five minutes that remain on that particular clock for reactions and pushback, that'd be great. Matthew, I'd love to hear where we're wrong, of course. So this is an invitation to pushback. So I just wanted to emphasize a little bit the network effects that Phil had mentioned. I think that it's really important to look at how, in many cases, people do want to adopt certain interoperable technologies or certain solutions but they can't agree on which one's going to be the correct one and oftentimes essentially nobody wants to be the equivalent of the HP touchpad user who just had everything dropped on them. You don't want to be the first person to adopt a new health care record type and then have nobody else do it. And government really does play an interesting role here. One example I wanted to bring up was actually with barcode adoption. Something that I found was very interesting was the question of how do you get everybody, all of the manufacturers in the industry to start putting barcodes on their labels and it was actually government intervention that created this but in a way that wasn't really expected. The government had essentially told all food producers that they would have to put nutritional information on their labels so a massive redesign of labels that was already slated for some time in the 1970s when an industry consortia basically came around and said while we're doing this, why don't we also put barcodes on them? It's great and Matthew's done some really interesting work also looking at why barcodes did emerge in the way they did but why for instance, riffids have not so much and QR codes I think is the next example where in fact we see lots of adoption of QR codes in these kind of funny ways as kind of a better version of the barcode and I think there's some really good stories as to why different things did or didn't happen there. Yeah, that's another interesting example of network effects where we have some serious lock in problems. Basically you have an interoperable solution that works very well, perhaps too well because now people don't want to move on from that particular solution to one that might be even more efficient. I think the air traffic control is a good example of that as well. Other reactions and particularly critiques pushback? We can't possibly be right in all those 10 claims, Scott. Just another note on the comment about iTunes. Apple's argument was also that they were completely interoperable on MP3 and that the argument that Steve Jobs made in his letter was that the majority of stuff on iPods was actually MP3, ripped CDs so that in reality the percentage of non-interoperable stuff was relatively small. I think one of the challenges in most interoperability debates is at what level should you mandate the interoperability? So is it enough to say that you can use an unencrypted MP3 file in any of these different systems or is it in fact much more important to focus on what are the effects on innovation? What are the effects, for instance, on consumer choice and autonomy and so forth of having a more broadly interoperable system and at what point can we force that? Alicia? Got a question sort of on that note. Frank would like you to discuss how we should reconcile interoperability with diversity of ideas, languages, participants, all kinds of diversity. That's an amazing point. Of course, do you want that one? Sure. Thank you. It's a very, very hard question. One that we play out in the book is the distinction between uniformity and standardization and so forth on one hand and diversity on the other. And I think this goes to some of the discussion I was having with Scott about what do we consider to be interoperability? I think one of the downsides of highly interoperable systems in some cases is high levels of uniformity, right? That we get to a point at which at some level we're mandating things to be the same. And that's often true with sort of maximally interoperable things. We'll just use the example in their traffic control of mandating not just English, but a specialized version of English. And I noted somebody in the question tool was talking about cultural imperialism and so forth, which is quite right to think about on that level and to concern. On the other hand, one of the things that interoperability is great at doing is allowing diversity to flourish often above that level. So I think this actually is one of the ways in which the interoperability discussion marries up with the generativity discussion and the cooperation in other ones that we've looked at, which is if you get interoperability right at a certain level, it can allow for different forms of diversity to flourish. Another way to look at it, the second way is to say interoperability doesn't demand for things to be the same. It demands that they work together in different ways. And so in instances where what you want to do is to have lots of different kinds of systems, that's where you think about the middleware that Scott was talking about. You may get to suboptimal interoperability among them, but you may be benefiting in the sense of maintaining a certain degree of diversity. And I think that's actually one way in which these different layers help us to explain it. Ken. A really mundane example that we can all sort of think through just in our own experience. The plug example got me thinking of it as batteries where you can have a flourishing, they're standard interoperable batteries, but now we've moved beyond those because for various market reasons, because of wanting to innovate and the value of the innovation is sufficient that an expensive battery is warranted. Yeah, thanks for a good example, Scott. I'd like to bring this back to the beginning of the week, which is the internet is interoperable at the IP layer. Right. This is your common layer that you just spoke of. I just want to remind people that that's what's made the internet to what it is, is that level of interoperability. Very simple, non-involved, non-directive ability to move packets around and get them to the right destination. And how many patents on that technology, Scott? Luckily, not enough. Yeah, it has not been interrupted, the process has not been interrupted. And by the way, if it had been, they'd be over by now. But the other thing is that the fact that you have interoperability in an email standard so that the message that I send to you is completely interoperable does not mean that the view you have of that email is the same view as I have because we can use different user interfaces and they can be completely different. You can have huge amounts of innovation at the edges and the standard of the stuff going between is what's driving, enabling that innovation. To me, that is a perfect note to end on, or I don't know if you want a last word, but this seems to me... I would appreciate the last word in the sense of acknowledging that this book and the research behind it, as you, I think, guessed by now, has been a huge team effort. I would certainly like to acknowledge the great work of the student researchers, including Matt, led by Caroline Nolan, who did a fantastic job. We also had terrific workshops and conversations with colleagues from industry, inclusive Ann-Marie Levins, to no small part, so thanks to you. And of course, also thanks to all of our colleagues, including Jochai and Teri and all the faculty that has presented during this week for making this research possible, although they may disagree in no small part on certain claims that we make, but I think that's, again, very much in the spirit of Bergman, what we presented today here, at least as far as the process of research is concerned. So a big thank you, thanks. All right.