i guess his point was that the reason the web works at all, or tcp/ip, or email, or any of the really successful platforms - is because of certain contracts of

i guess his point was that the reason the web works at all, or tcp/ip, or email, or any of the really successful platforms - is because of certain contracts of openness and (essentially) fair play that are built into the very structure of how they are built. this openness allows them to scale to that level and without it you can't get to truly global scale.