WASHINGTON -- The US government should refrain from most types of Internet regulation, President Clinton said Monday at a White House speech on electronic commerce.
Clinton also ordered the FCC to promote high-speed Internet connections and the Commerce Department to ensure truthful advertising online by extending "the proud tradition of consumer protection into cyberspace."
Citing a report released Monday by a government group working on e-commerce, Clinton said, "Information technology now accounts for over a third of our economic growth," and government should follow one guiding principle: "First, do no harm."
"With 140 million users now around the world and 52,000 more Americans logging on for the first time every single day, the Internet is remaking the way we live, the way we learn, the way we work," Vice President Gore said at the event.
Gore said his chief domestic-policy advisor, David Beier, will chair a White House e-commerce task force. Beier, a former Genentech lobbyist with close ties to liberal Democrats, joined Gore's office last April.
"He's got a pretty good feel for privacy and civil-liberties issues," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Before the public event, Gore met privately with a few dozen high-tech leaders including Bob Davis, CEO of Lycos, which is acquiring Wired Digital, and David Farber, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The event also included Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and eBay CEO Meg Whitman.
"He seemed to understand fundamentally what we were talking about," Farber said. "That's very impressive."
The report released Monday breaks little new ground and instead reaffirms the White House's approach to Internet regulation:
Privacy Regulations: The best way to protect Americans' privacy online is to encourage corporations to self-regulate by setting "privacy principles with third-party enforcement," the report said. But in "certain areas" Uncle Sam should step in, when setting standards, and restricting data collection about children, for example.
The report continues to straddle the fence between privacy advocates, like EPIC, and libertarian groups, like the Cato Institute, that would prefer to nix all data collection rules.
