______________________________________________________________________ Schoolhouse Videos and CD's ______________________________________________________________________ 21 companies offer financial support for Internet legal policy group __________________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 1996 Nando.net Copyright © 1996 Scripps-McClatchy Western

TACOMA, Wash (Oct 2, 1996 00:18 a.m. EDT) -- A year ago, a group of lawyers gathered in Seattle to launch an organization they hoped would help set legal policies for the Internet.

On Tuesday, that group announced the formal financial support of 21 international companies -- from Microsoft to Netscape, from British Telecom to Bell Canada. These companies and the researchers employed by the newly named "Internet Law & Policy Forum," hope to set Internet guidelines for governments and industry on such issues as copyright, content and commerce.

[...]

This group hopes to help answer those questions and others by researching and pooling policies from governments, companies and legal experts. Then researchers will propose guidelines for others to follow. If companies with such competing interests as AT&T and MCI, and Mastercard and Visa can agree on Internet guidelines, Gidari's group hopes governments will let industry regulate itself, he said Tuesday.

"It should make government less interested in addressing an issue by a law when they can see people are acting responsibly without it," he said. "It diffuses the need to do something. It's a lot harder to legislate when the problem is being addressed."

An apparantly good motive... although that self-censorship is no better than normal censorship is something to consider. [...]

Corporate sponsors are America Online, AT&T, Americatel Corp., Bell Canada, BBN Corp., British Telecom, CiscoSystems Inc., Deutsche Telekom, General Electric Information Services, General Magic, Hong Kong Telecom, IBM, Mastercard International, MCI Communications Corp., Microsoft, Netscape, Omnes -- a Schlumberger//Cable & Wireless Co., Oracle Corp., Premenos Technology Corp., Telus Corp. and Visa International.

During the last year, working groups focused on two areas. They looked at how to certify signatures and information used in electronic commerce and what to do about unacceptable materials on the Internet. The results will be presented at a conference the London conference.

The group will be led by Jeffrey Ritter, a United Nations expert who now works for ECLIPS, a research program on the laws and policies of electronic commerce located at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. He helped found the forum with Gidari and Peter Harter, public policy counsel for Netscape.

Anybody at Netscape know much about this third guy? The United Nations connection of the first one doesn't seem encouraging... the UN is heavy on national sovreignty and lacking in civil liberties, especially economic ones.

"Without an established framework, the Internet faces a confusing and potentially disabling range of national laws seeking to govern a global environment," Ritter said. "The Internet Law & Policy Forum offers the potential for a neutral venue in which the collaborative resources of those parties that are helping to drive the Internet forward can be focused to achieve genuine progress in resolving legal and policy issues."

Copyright © 1996 Nando.net