My biggest problem is when the pundits (and by extension, those that punt to them) frame this entire debate in terms of the Market. To do so is to argue that only solutions that are good for The Market are good solutions; that when a particular policy is market-agnostic or market-negative, even though it may be good policy for People (yes, remember them ???) it is irrelevant or bad. This debate is NOT about the Worldwide Encryption Market! At 05:02 PM 6/30/97 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:

Marc Andreessen from Netscape spoke at a National Press Club luncheon on June 20. Attached is an excerpt from a transcript of his remarks.

-Declan

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NATIONAL PRESS CLUB LUNCHEON MARC ANDREESSEN, NETSCAPE FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 1997

[...]

The goal here in all these markets should be open access -- open access for any new competitor who wants to offer content and services, who wants to offer hardware and software, who wants to offer bandwidth for the Net itself. And then open access should also allow each consumer and business to choose and buy from any set of vendors it wants.

Now, I am not suggesting anything radical -- no major new laws or sweeping regulations, but simply that we must ensure we have vigorous enforcement first of existing antitrust laws and vigorous promotion of normal healthy competitive markets in these areas -- network services, software and hardware, content and consumer services. Once we have that, then we need to make sure we just don't screw it up. For example -- just one example -- patently ridiculous limitations on the ability of American companies to both produce and use encryption software and hardware internationally. Encryption technology now is freely available to criminals and terrorists all around the world, overseas, on the Web. You can buy it from NTT, you can buy it from companies out of South Africa, England, and many other countries. And we are really at this point deluding ourselves with respect to our ability to control this technology. The genie is clearly already out of the bottle.

However, current regulations, current arms traffic regulations that apply to this technology and the new McCain-Kerry bill that just was introduced a couple of days ago -- the real effect there is that they are ceding the international data security market to non-U.S. vendors. They are really stunting now the development of the Net as a commercial medium, and they are leaving American companies fundamentally unprotected from economic espionage and terrorism abroad. One final example, imposing censorship laws in this new consumer content medium that are more stringent and restrictive than those on newspaper and television.

[...]

------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/