Re education, I don’t think we need to get wrapped around the axle debating whether a particular thing, whether it be education or the Internet, is a public good in the economic sense. (And IMO we can’t just unilaterally declare “the Internet is a public good” in an economic sense.) I think the better way to approach it is to ask, “Is an open Internet in the public interest?” (not, “Is it a public good”). Clearly the answer is yes; in economic terms the Internet as it has existed has “positive externalities”, i.e., good things have happened as a result of the Internet existing, and those good things have accrued not just to the private entities who helped build the Internet and the services that run on it, but to the general public as well. Given that answer, then clearly promoting the idea of the open Internet (as in the Mozilla Manifesto) is in the public interest as well.

The reason I ask, is that I want to be able to clearly articulate how these terms would apply to Mozilla’s efforts to educate the public about the importance of the Internet, the Open Web, etc.

This gets a little recursive, but couldn’t it be said that a Mozilla education program focused on raising awareness of the importance of the Internet as a public good is itself a public good/service provided by Mozilla? Could “education” be a product right alongside Firefox, provided as part of our public benefit/interest mission?