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In effect, mobile carriers have created a second-class Internet connection. This spring, Verizon demanded that Google remove free tethering applications from the Android Market so that it can charge users a monthly fee to turn their smartphones into mobile hotspots. Combined with restrictive data caps—often a low two to five gigabytes per month (for comparison, the typical Blu-ray disc containing your favorite movies can hold 50 gigabytes of data)—mobile connectivity severely limits user options.

When compared with the freedoms still present on other types of broadband connections, mobile networks' demands offer fewer opportunities to think differently or to innovate. This is particularly problematic because it disenfranchises those (such as minorities, people in lower income brackets, and young adults) who are more likely to depend on smartphones to access the Web. In fact, Pew Internet and American Life Project found that smartphone ownership is highest with minorities, and nearly one in five young adults only access the Web on mobile networks. The increasing limitations on the Internet craftsman means these groups do not have a voice in how the Web evolves.

Policies addressing the digital divide must embrace the Internet Craftsman and confront the deep and growing chasm between users of restrictive technologies and those free to innovate without gatekeepers. The Internet's potential to empower is strongest when users are free to turn their imaginations into reality, not when innovation is confined by increasingly restrictive policies of network operators. The future of democratic communications depends on the ability of network participants to have control over the technologies we use every day.

If everyone with a 3G unlimited plan started tethering and using their phones for home internet (instead of the relatively limited bandwidth things you tend to do on a cell phone), pretty soon nobody would have speeds faster than dial-up. This is a difficult problem with no easy solution. I don't like the fact that mobile data costs so much, and I do think that mobile companies could certainly be more consumer friendly, but it's a myth to think that we can all have cheap, fast, unlimited mobile internet access - you can probably have any two of those, but not all three.  

I really think you're kind of off base on the "mobile is second-class access and that's inherently unfair". Mobile is limited because cellular bandwidth currently is limited and you therefore have to pay more for it. To extend your craftsman analogy, anyone can buy wood and a hammer, but access to a five-axis lathe is limited by complexity and associated price. I don't especially want to have trouble checking my email at lunch because some guy is ripping the collected works of Orson Welles through bittorrent on the same cell. Different tools for different uses. I seriously doubt anyone with a strong interest in programming really can't get access to cheap or free broadband these days...say, at every library I've been to in the last 10 years? Open access is a necessity, but so is working within the limitation of the existing tech.

I worry that as consumers become accustomed to (more or less justified) mobile caps and limits, landline providers will get away with implementing caps that are significantly less justifiable, and done more from a profit motive than from a desire or need to provide improved service.  

There would be no problem if carriers wanted to restrict the volume of traffic, but that's not the issue. Instead they want to restrict how you use that volume. They're happy to let you use gigabytes of bandwidth watching YouTube on your phone, but start threatening you or force you to buy an outrageously expensive tethering plan if you want to do some casual browsing on your laptop/netbook while it's connected through your phone.

David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man

ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.

"Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"

MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.

"Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."

Peer 2 Peer University

University of the People

Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.

much open courseware is "lousy,"

"There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"

"It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."

a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.

Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."