An old messenger brings a new White House message.
Bill Clinton is searching for redemption in cyberspace. During his first term, Clinton endorsed the Communications Decency Act, championed heinous copyright law reforms, and fought tooth and nail against encryption liberalization. No wonder, then, that many Internet users regard his administration as something like an ongoing bad dream. But now, a second-term Clinton is trying to do good by the Net.
The White House peace offering comes in the form of a 21-page report that, for the first time, suggests a unified set of guidelines for the administration's Internet policy. The document, "A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce" (available at www.iitf.nist.gov/electronic _commerce.htm), promises a hands-off policy, no new Net taxes, and no "unnecessary regulations." More than 20 federal agencies participated in drafting the framework, which summarizes the administration's plans to address privacy, technical standards, electronic payment systems, and intellectual property on the Net.
The proposal isn't flawless, but it's not a bad start. Written in language designed to appeal to netizens, the document argues, "All governments should recognize that the genius and explosive success of the Internet can be attributed in part to its decentralized nature and bottom-up governance."
All well and good, but the real danger is that the White House's messenger may taint the message. The author of the framework is Ira Magaziner - a man perhaps best known as the chief architect of Bill Clinton's failed health care reform. Magaziner spearheaded the administration's 1993 plan to regulate the US$800 billion American medical industry by implementing government controls on rate increases for health insurance premiums. That proposal went down in flames, and today many see Magaziner's name as synonymous with elaborate bureaucratic boondoggles.
Will he treat the Net the same way? Will the Feds ration hours on America Online? Will Microsoft and Apple be transformed into a managed network of software providers? Magaziner insists he has no such scheme in mind. "Health care is very different from the Internet. It can't operate in a free market," he says. "The Internet is a whole different ball game. With the Internet, you have a medium that functions as an almost perfect market."
The proposed policy could also bring a sort of redemption for Magaziner, who still seems nettled by the failure of his health care plan. When talk- ing about the Net, Magaziner speaks in careful, dispassionate tones. But mention health care, and he leans forward in his seat, clearly animated and slightly agitated. "I don't think there's anything that needs to be redeemed," he maintains. "I'm very proud of what I did on health care." Plus, he stresses, the Net will be different. "If there's a vacuum, government agencies fill it with regulation. We want to stop that from happening. The role we've laid out for government is fairly minimalist. It preserves the basic freedom and positive chaos of the Internet."
"Positive chaos"? Is this really a government official speaking? Yes, but Magaziner is hardly typical. An array of federal agencies have already moved against the Net - and show no sign of relenting. The Justice Department has railed against strong encryption for years. The US Patent and Trademark Office marshaled a global offensive against the right to make fair use of intellectual property that can be accessed online. And the Federal Trade Commission is fashioning ways to regulate Internet services.
Managing this internal schizophrenia is Magaziner's challenge: he must reconcile wildly divergent views of the Net, referee bureaucratic turf battles, and cajole reluctant agencies into adopting the provisions of his plan. "Within the administration, we're faced with some differing points of view," Magaziner admits. "It's a very difficult and thorny problem."
Thorny problems are nothing new to Magaziner. The former management consultant has spent much of the last 20 years tackling prickly public policy issues - projects that often ended in stinging defeat. After college, he decided to transform a broken-down Massachusetts town into a model of municipal social activism with a food co-op, low-income housing, and a weekly consumer newspaper. Magaziner now calls the project naïve. In 1979, he devised an industrial policy that suggested the Swedish government should shift money away from industries such as timber and shipbuilding. It met with a lukewarm response and produced mixed results. Four years later, he crafted a labyrinthine scheme to pour money into Rhode Island's high tech sector through bond issues. Voters rejected the proposal four to one. Magaziner's 1,400-page national health care plan met with a similar wall of insurmountable opposition.
In other words, Magaziner tried to construct a model city, a model state, and two model countries - with anything but positive results. Now he's trying to build a model cyberspace as part of his attempt to devise a Washington-based strategy to deal with the radically decentralized Internet.
A close read of his draft reveals that it's not entirely deregulatory. In some areas, it recommends increased government intervention. The Patent and Trademark Office will hold hearings on legal "issues relating to domain names." The Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve will conduct "case-by-case supervision" of digital cash systems. Six cabinet agencies will "develop international guidelines" for a key escrow system that ensures government access to encrypted communications.
Those, sadly, do not seem like planks in a hands-off platform. Neither is Magaziner's plan to work more closely with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international body that has been a vehicle for censorship and encryption restrictions. Nor is the report's admission that "some government guidance may be needed on issues that the marketplace alone" cannot address. And Magaziner's call for "a small increase" in funding to carry out his plan is anything but downsized.
Still, the proposal could be much, much worse, and Magaziner had to accommodate many existing agency policies when crafting it. Any harm will come not from what the framework says, but from what those agencies actually do. For that, netizens will have to wait and see. And for Magaziner and the White House, redemption has not yet arrived.
