Online Monopolies: Virtue or Vice

Session Date: April 13, 2009

The Session was organized by ADK and DAL

It featured a debate on the Value of Online Monopolies between Professor Jonathan Zittrain and special guest Peter Thiel with closing remarks provided by Professor Terry Fisher

Introduction: Using Technology and Incentives to produce quality content

The Basic Framework of our course session can be replicated irrespective of the content.

The main ingredients are:

1) An interesting topic with two reasonable viewpoints

2) Two intelligent and articulate discussion leaders

3) An engaged classroom. 3 main ingredients:

a) No Laptops

b) Name placards.

c) Required preparation with threat of "cold-calling". (Note: in our session, we did not have to resort to "cold-calling" because the class was engaged and prepared).

i) To execute on cold-calling, we suggest a random-name generator, which can be designed in Microsoft Excel with the following formula:

=VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(StudentNum1,StudentNumN),StudentNum1:StudentNamesN,2); <--- This function then refers to a two column list. Column 1 = List of "StudentNums" from 1 to N, where N = Number of students. Column 2 = List of student names.

A link to an example of this random name-caller can be found here Random Name Generator

<script src="http://video.bigthink.com/player.js?width=516&height=344&embedCode=MweTRpOl3fu1WDGcP8qwxVYdPcm6Ww8r"></script>

Old Outline

Prior to the class, students had access to this outline: The Internet, Industry and Investing. The original framework for the course discussion was broader, but in planning the course we realized that narrowing the discussion would be beneficial