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IP: Policing the Internet: Anyone but Government
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 06:48:05 -0500
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/022000internet-security-review.htm Policing the Internet: Anyone but Government By STEVE LOHR he attacks on eBay, Yahoo, E*Trade and other big Web sites earlier this month showed the Internet to be surprisingly vulnerable to a few laptop-toting cyber-vandals. This is a pressing public concern, surely, as the nation increasingly comes to rely for commerce and everyday communication on this chaotic, global computer network. But when President Clinton met last week with more than two dozen representatives of the Internet community, a big role for government was not on the agenda. The president asked what could or should the Government do. Not a lot, the Internet elite told him. The message: It's an industry issue. "No one in that room was asking the government to fix this problem," said Nicholas Donofrio, senior vice president for technology at I.B.M., who attended the meeting. The gathering epitomized the main thrust of Government policy in the Internet arena. Government, the theory goes, should offer a forum and be a cooperative partner, so as to facilitate the rapid rise of Internet commerce. That stance was set in a July 1997 policy document on E-commerce written by Ira Magaziner, a senior White House policy adviser at the time. His document extolled the "breakneck speed of change in the technology" and stated, "Government attempts to regulate [the Internet] are likely to be outmoded by the time they are finally enacted." The hands-off approach, however, will be challenged more and more as the <snip>
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