“Is generativity really the prime value?”
The question “Why” generativity sharpens the mind on the values issue not so much on the priority of values question but the “trade-off” between the process (*generativity*) and the alternative (let us call it the hybrid regulatory model, that embraces the four modalities). Here we come back to the old Hobbesian nightmare about governance…

“Here’s one possible alternative: maybe the most important value of the internet is the widespread ability to engage in one-to-many communication. To complicate it further, maybe the prime value is the capacity to do so anonymously. It is easy to imagine design choices that would promote generativity at the expense of these communicative virtues, and vice versa.”
True – I see where you are coming from. But if one asks hypothetically at the time of the creation of the Internet (sometime circa Al Gore’s famous pronouncement), what the Bill of Rights for the Internet should be – I find that I encounter not dissimilar problems set out in the Federalist Papers.

That said, and this is my second point, it isn’t clear to me that the solutions JZ points to (primarily compromising network neutrality to somehow improve security) would be particularly better for generativity than a Tivo-ized client, mainly because that initial compromise would put us on a very slippery slope. If you have only a weak moral/ethical basis to defend a non-discriminatory network, then on what basis do you defend a non-discriminatory client? (Or to put it another way: pragmatically, how is generativity a strong principle that gives us bright-ish policy lines? I can’t see it being very useful in practice.)

On (1), I do agree that it is a weakness of the paper that it doesn’t strongly consider alternatives. However, communication mostly feels like a means, not an end, to me. If cheap/easy communication were a (the?) prime value, wouldn’t cheap/easy AT&T POTS have been just as good? The ‘net’s generativity meant that we could transform cheap/easy communication via modems into first email, then the web, then VOIP, now myspace, and who knows what next. Sure, all of these are ‘just’ communication, and likely communication in some way is always going to be the killer app of the internet, but the ‘net is new and different because of its ability to constantly generate new and better ways of communicating. That happens because of JZ’s prime value- generativity.

(And writing that paragraph makes me realize again what a painfully awkward word generativity is. Oh well.)