Democracy and Cyberspace: First Principles
by Ira Magaziner


Let me start by noting a couple of things, which I believe this audience probably already knows. We are quite convinced that we really are in a period of fundamental economic transformation, and we've just released a study from our Commerce Department a couple of weeks ago saying this. To get our Commerce Department to agree to this is something that means it must be so. Even though we're given to hyperbole in the Washington area, we don't think it's hyperbole to say that this economic transformation is on the order of what occurred in the Industrial Revolution. The reason we say that is because the information technology industries have gone from 4% to 6% to over 8% of the economy over the past decade. Directly, they account for over one third of the real growth in the economy over the past three years.

If we look at what has caused that to occur, it has been the building out of the Internet and the networking of computers which has brought that growth. The Internet has gone from having 4 million to about 100 million people on it. One may argue about exactly what year it will take place-- I think Mr. Negroponte is a little more optimistic than some-- but I think there's no doubt that we're going to get to a billion people by the year 2005 at the latest. That building out from 100 million to a billion is only going to accelerate the importance of the information technology industries in the growth of the economy. There are some other indicators of this. We had a 2.1% inflation rate this past year, which given the growth that we had in the economy, is quite good. It would have been a 3.2% inflation rate, were it not for the decline in prices in computers alone.

So the declining prices that occurred in one small sector of the economy took more than a third off the inflation rate in the economy as a whole, while still contributing a third of the real growth to the economy in broader information technology. It's a remarkable occurrence that we now have over 7 million people employed in information technology occupations. The average wage in those occupations is over $46,000 a year compared to $28,000 for the rest of the private economy. We are creating high-paying jobs, contributing to real growth, and holding down inflation from the information technology industry.

The information technology industry is only a small piece of what is going to occur in the coming years. Built on top of that, we have the phenomenon of electronic commerce. There are a couple of different things we speak of when we speak of electronic commerce. The first is the fact that businesses are now putting up their purchasing, their supply-chain management, inventory management, customer relations logistics and their business-to-business transactions on the Internet. They are realizing very significant cost-savings and productivity improvements. Virtually every sector of the economy is affected.

Last year there was about $6 billion of commerce done electronically. With investments now being made--so this is not speculative--that will exceed $300 billion of business-to-business electronic commerce in the United States alone by the year 2002. What is driving that is companies in a wide-range of economic activities ranging from the General Electrics and Boeings to the Federal Expresses, to the Ciscos, to the Grangers of wholesaling, to the Walmarts in retailing, that have made these investments. They have realized such substantial savings, productivity improvements and cycle-time improvements that it is driving them to spread these investments throughout their companies, and it is driving other companies to try to emulate them. So a General Electric that did $1 billion of business-to-business commerce on the Internet last year projects that it will be doing $6 billion by the Year 2000. That's the kind of growth that we are seeing taking place.

You can then look to one final statistic, which is that 45% of all business equipment investment now is in information technology equipment. That is businesses essentially creating the environment for business-to-business electronic commerce. In addition to that, we're re seeing the beginnings of the digital sale on delivery of products and services across the Internet. It's very much in its infancy, although it will eventually be bigger than the business-to-business transactions. It ranges from people purchasing and having delivered to them games and music to movies and software of various sorts. About 10 million people are now doing their banking, or some piece of their banking, on the Internet. Seven percent of all travel tickets for airlines purchased in the United States next year will be purchased and delivered electronically on the Internet.

We're also beginning to see professional consulting services, educational services, medical diagnostic services, news services and a range of other activities being sold and delivered. Then there is the selling or retailing of physical goods--books, flowers, automobiles, clothing--where the products are sold on the Internet and, then, obviously delivered physically. That is also growing in a dramatic fashion. The final type of business activity is essentially a new type of business that involves direct marketing and advertising to affinity groups; companies where they collect together discussion groups initially, of people with common interests and essentially develop businesses where people advertise to those groups or do direct marketing to them or sell merchandise and so on.

I've gone through this economic discussion because, if you take the totality of what I've just described, it means that increasingly economies are going to be dependent upon this medium for their economic growth over the next couple of decades--and I think governments all around the world are realizing this now. Five years down the road, we will add the effects of the human Genome Project and what we learn about that to the information technology industries, and those two areas will drive our economies for the next quarter century, and they'll affect broad swaths of the economy.

This means that the Internet which started as a research tool, developed a bit as an educational tool, and had a culture which was very much of a libertarian that grew up around it, is now confronting a commercial culture of those who are now betting their company on the Internet. Governments are also becoming much more interested, because the success of their economic policies, in some way, is related to what occurs now in the development of information technology and the Internet. The clash of cultures that occurs among the commercial, governmental and--what you might call--the traditional Internet community, is something which I observe in my office everyday in one way or another, and it's quite remarkable. It's something that one wishes one could have a movie of because it's quite interesting.

We've been recently struggling through the issue of how to develop governance for the technical management of the Internet--the domain name system, the numbering system, and so on. During the course of December or January, I had a number of the key players who were interested in this issue coming to have lunch at the White House with me. The clash of cultures was very evident in this, and I'll talk more about this in a minute, because it comes to questions of governance in this new digital age. What all this means is that I think we are going to have to make some fundamental changes in our commercial, legal and economic paradigms, and also in the way in which we interrelate politically. Those changes will also be on the order of magnitude of what occurred during the Industrial Revolution.

This project of coordinating our work in the Internet and electronic commerce grew out of a question the President asked me a couple of years ago. He asked me to try to identify a couple of major initiatives he could take, if he got a second term, which would extend the good economy we have into the next century. You probably all are glad about not having to hear anymore about the "bridge to the next century" that you heard about during the campaign, but it is something we took seriously. We've had a good economy since 1992, and depending upon your political persuasion you may or may not give this administration credit for it. At least you have to say we didn't screw it up. It's been a pretty good economy, and we think that the good economy will continue for a few more years. So his question was, "what can we do that will ensure its longer-term continuation?" The digital economy was something that wasn't even on the original list. But as I went around talking to people, it became clear that it would be, perhaps, the fundamental driver. And so we elevated it to great importance in the White House, and made it one of our strategic objectives.

One of the first things I did when I started working on this was to read some histories of the Industrial Revolution. It was interesting, because there were fundamental changes that took place. Some countries embraced them and, inevitably, were the ones who succeeded. Then those that did not, and tried to hold on to their old ways of doing things, were the ones who fell backwards. We are in a similar period right now. And the questions are, "what are those new paradigms, who will embrace them, and who won't?"

The subject is "First Principles," and let me make a couple of suggestions about what I think some of those principles are. Let me say up front that I suspect I am probably wrong about some of it, and I won't know for a couple of years. But, at least, it's our best thinking about what some of those principles are.

The first principle is that this will be an environment or a world where private actors lead, not governments. The reason for that is not ideological, from our point of view. We're Democrats; we don't dislike government. We think government has legitimate roles to play in society. For example, we were having a discussion tonight about health care. I have a very different view about the role of government in these two areas. I think the government should guarantee everybody adequate access to health care, but the digital economy moves too quickly and requires too much flexibility for the processes of government to be, in most cases, successful in relating to it.

I can assure you now, having worked in the private sector for 20 years in my career and in government for five, that although the private sector has its bureaucracies--and those are sometimes forgotten--government bureaucracies really are much more burdensome. It's very difficult to work at a high productivity level in government; it's very difficult to work flexibly; it's very difficult to move quickly; and the Internet requires those things. It also is often true in government that irrationality, fueled by some particular event that occurs in the public dialogue, can take hold and sweep bad actions into being without enough forethought. That can happen anywhere in society, but I think governments can be particularly susceptible to it. And so for those reasons, we believe that even where collective action is necessary as a first instance, and it won't work in all cases, but as a first instance--we ought to look to private collective action in one way or another to handle questions or issues that need to be dealt with. And I'll give some examples in a few minutes.

The second principle is that there are two different ways that one could think about the Internet and the Internet economy growing up. The first model is the traditional telecommunications and broadcast model, where governments all around the world for various reasons either owned it or regulated it, as we do here in the United States through the Federal Communications Commission. The other model is to say that it ought to be market-driven. That is, that private buyers and sellers should be able to come together to do business and communicate with each other free of government regulation. And that, with respect to the economic activity, governments should provide a uniform commercial environment for the conduct of contracts. If a buyer and seller or two people coming together wish to have the protection of a legal regime of contracts, they can do so. They don't have to, but it's there if they want to choose to operate in it. The history of free enterprise teaches us that, in most cases, buyers and sellers will wish to have that protection. The role of governments is to help codify contracts rather than regulation.

Now we believe that the second paradigm--the market-driven environment--ought to be the one that governs in this Internet economy. This is not ideological; it's practical. We think that competition and consumer choice should be the driving forces in this new world. We don't think that the reasons why we regulated telecommunications and broadcast hold anymore. For example, with broadcast, there was a limited amount of spectrum to be allocated; so the government, in the l920s, began doing the allocation. It was because the government was conferring commercial value on certain groups that it regulated them. With the telephone system, when the infrastructure was being built out, the size of that investment necessary relative to the size of the companies was huge. So, governments licensed monopolies and then regulated them to build out the infrastructure. With the Internet, you'll have almost unlimited bandwidth, and you don't need spectrum allocation.


In my view, you will probably see the greatest competition to build out the infrastructure of the Internet that we've ever seen in free-market economies. Computer companies, software companies, telecommunication companies, broadcast companies, consumer electronics companies, wireless companies--even electric utilities--publishers are all vying to build out the infrastructure for the Internet. The best thing we can do is to let that competition occur with consumer choice driving. What makes this significant is that telecommunications, broadcast and the Internet are all going to converge, as everybody in this room knows--although most people in the society haven't come to that realization yet. The Internet will be on your television. Broadcast television will be on your personal computer. You make telephone calls from both of them. It will be delivered to your home by satellite, wireless, television cable or telephone line. What we are saying is that "conversion" environment should be a market-driven environment, which means we have to go through considerable de-regulation. Now that doesn't mean there aren't certain public purposes that need to be followed, but it means that the basic structure should be a market-driven structure.

The third principle is that when government does need to act in this arena--as it will to help codify uniform commercial code for dealing with issues of taxation, intellectual property protection, and the like--the actions ought to be precise, uniform and transparent. So, rather than passing omnibus legislation of some sort, we should act only in precise ways when it is necessary to act.

The fourth principle--and this is one that's probably the hardest thing for people to understand, at least in Washington--is that whatever we do needs to take cognizance of the nature of the medium that we're dealing with. For example, technology changes very rapidly with this medium, so any policy needs to be technology-neutral. This is because if its tied to a given technology, it'll be outmoded before it's enacted. Similarly, this is a de-centralized medium. Therefore, attempts to centrally control it or censor it are impossible, even if they were desirable (which I would argue they're not). Life is too short to spend too much time doing things that are impossible, so we need to respect the nature of the medium in the way we try to deal with policy issues related to it. Finally, this is the first medium and the first marketplace that is global from the very beginning. Therefore, the traditional model where industries or where mediums grow up within countries, and countries negotiate how they work together doesn't work here. From the beginning, you need a global framework, which is why our strategy has been pursuing a global set of agreements.

Now, added to these basic principles, let me throw a couple of more out, and then I'll give you some examples of what we mean by these and how we are working with them. There are a series of areas where we are trying to engage in gaining international agreement, and also among the states in the United States, to try to create the kind of framework that can allow this medium to grow in a free way. Those include things like dealing with tariff and tax issues, where we're trying to have the Internet become a duty-free environment, and we're hoping to get an agreement in Geneva through the World Trade Organization in a couple of weeks that will do that. We've been opposing any discriminatory taxation against the Internet--no bit taxes or Internet access tax or inter-telephony taxes.

We've also been working to try to form agreements on uniform commercial code, on intellectual property protection, on ensuring that standards will be set and electronic payments developed in a market-driven way, without government regulation. We are also trying to get systems put in place that will allow privacy to be protected and so on. But in the way in which we're going about these, we're trying to respect the principles that I've mentioned earlier, and I'll give you a couple of examples.

In the question of content, we started down a path that was not a correct path initially. Now, I think we have gotten to a better place. We don't believe that one should attempt to censor the Internet. Governments should not attempt to censor the Internet. As I said earlier, even if they wanted to, they couldn't, but, in my view, they shouldn't want to anyway. What should be put in place is a model of empowering people to make their own decisions in an individual way--this should be a question of consumer or individual choice. If you're the kind of parent that's afraid of the Internet--because your children understand it better than you, and you're afraid of what they're getting into--when you sign up with your Internet service provider, you should have the ability to check some boxes according to your own value system. This would allow you your own choice in a simple way which would conform to your value system.

There should be software packages that might be identified with organizations that you feel comfortable with. Christian Coalition might have a package or the Children's Television Network or whatever. So you, as a parent, can say, "well, that's OK--if they have a filtering package, I'll go with that and feel comfortable." The important thing is that there's choice for the consumer or the parent to do what they wish, not the government saying what it should be. Or if you're the kind of parent that mistakenly believes you understand the Internet better than your children, then you can let everything through. In the Browser or Search Engine software, you should be able to do the filtering you want. If you love violence and you hate sex, you can filter out the sex and let the violence through. Of course, the methods to do this are not going to be fool-proof or anywhere near it, but parents who didn't want their kids to see "Playboy" magazine. . . When I was growing up, that wasn't fool-proof either. I think the important paradigm here is one of empowering people to make their own choices, and the Internet uniquely gives us the ability to do that.

Similarly, with respect to privacy protection, it is very important that people are able to protect their privacy on the Internet. This is probably the most difficult issue we're facing right now. It's a fundamental value that we think should be respected in this country. It is also important, just an economic matter. The biggest concern people have about doing business on the Internet is the fear of losing their privacy. However, the fact that we feel strongly about that does not lead us to believe that we should pass a thousand pages of regulations to protect privacy. The reason is because, if we pass those regulations, we'd be lying to the American people. We would be saying to them, "don't worry- we're protecting your privacy," when we couldn't enforce it. Now what do I mean by that?

There are 10,000 Web pages that can be formed every week, and there's no way that any government agency could monitor them all to know whether they are conforming with whatever laws or regulations we would pass. Not too far down the road, the vast majority of those will also be somewhere else in the world. They might be on servers almost anywhere, so that even if we did find some place that we thought was violating privacy, tracking them down would be a hard thing to do. By the time we did, then legally prosecuting them would be very hard. So the notion that we can somehow protect these things in a central way would be a lie. Instead, what we're looking for is something which will empower people to be able to protect themselves, if they choose to do so.

The way we see this working is based on getting some private sector groups, which would include both industry and consumer groups, to come up with codes of conduct on privacy that were based on the OECD privacy principles which are widely accepted. That is, a seller or somebody running a Web-site should notify a consumer or somebody who visits that Web-site that information is being collected or that they want to collect it, and there should be an option for the consumer to say, "No, I don't want that." You would have the ability to control your own data. You might say--of course, you're doing the pioneering work here at MIT which will give the consumers the technical ability to do this-- "Yeah, it's OK with me if you collect this information, but only if you use it in this way, and not that way." Then the consumer should have the ability to update the information, check it for accuracy, and so on.

Effectively, there's a contract being formed between the seller and the buyer, and the buyer has control of what is done with their information. Now the code of conduct organization would specify this, and there would be a series of enforcement organizations that would enforce the code of conduct. So if a Web-site joined the code of conduct organization and was conforming with it, they would be able to display a privacy seal on the Web-site. The code of conduct organization would essentially hire college students or whatever to surf the Web for all places that had the seal to make sure that they are conforming, and the organization would be able to process consumer complaints, and would be able to refer cases of fraudulent behavior to the Federal Trade Commission under the existing anti-fraud laws.

This system would allow the government and the private sector--both consumer groups and industry--to go to 'Net users and say, "look, this is a free medium; you can go wherever you want, but be careful if you go some place that doesn't have one or another of these seals, because your privacy may not be protected." It would be up to you. We want to keep it a free medium, but as a matter of information and education, in these where you see a seal, you know that you're protected; where you don't, you may or may not be. By the way, we think most businesses that you'll want to do business with will have a seal, but it would be up to you. That would create a market incentive for Web-sites to get a seal because, otherwise, they'll be limiting the potential number of people who come and visit them. Some will; some won't. But most who are serious about wanting to do business, we think, will. Now, again, the paradigm here is to understand up front that in this new world, no government in a central way can guarantee its people that it can fully protect them. But what it can do is give tools and give the ability to people to protect themselves; we can empower them to protect themselves, and we think that is a more likely outcome in this new world.

Let me just turn to a couple of other issues that represent fundamental values, and these will get more to the question of the media and the question of the political realities.

One of the things that we're observing as the new digital economy comes is that it is scrambling some traditional political alliances and identifications in ways that are not predictable. It has been a shock to some in Washington that I, who am identified along with the First Lady as among the big liberals in the Administration, have nevertheless been advocating what would be regarded as a more libertarian or a more market-oriented approach or government backing-off approach with respect to Internet policy. To me, it's not surprising. My background is as a business strategy consultant, and, basically, you look to solve problems; you don't start with ideologies. You start with what you need to do to solve problems. And what is happening is that the advent of the new medium is causing changes in the alliances that one sees formed. And, for everything that we're doing in this whole area of Internet commerce and, also, the Internet in general--not everything but almost everything, about 80% of it--we have bi-partisan support. It's been a bi-partisan effort and, therefore, we're being able to move ahead on the issues, but the coalitions are very different than one sees almost anywhere else.

There are a couple of areas where, I think, we don't yet have it right, and these represent very fundamental challenges. First, I have a great concern. I think in this whole question of how we create the right kind of environment in terms of government-business relationship, I think we're moving in the right direction in almost all the areas now--at least, it seems to be--and we're also being successful. But I'm very concerned about issues of what effect the new digital economy will have on income-distribution and on relationships of rich and poor, both in the country and in the world, because these are tremendously empowering technologies. And, as a value, we need to be sure that it's not just the wealthier in our society or in the world who have access to them because if that's the case, it will widen the gaps between rich and poor enormously. And so, for those reasons, when I said earlier that this should not be a regulated environment, that does not mean to us that the government does not have roles to play. The government does have roles to play.

For example, we are advocating wiring all the schools and libraries, engaging in significant funding of training programs of teachers and working with private-sector people to bring these technologies to the inner city, to rural areas and so on. We think it is crucial that it happen. If it does happen in a serious way, then the new technologies, we think, can serve to narrow income gaps because the spectre that you see in so many inner city schools where kids are working with 20-year old textbooks, even in science or math, can be overcome with the Internet if it's done right. And a variety of other disadvantages that now exist in the society can also, if not be overcome, at least, be lessened. But the fundamental question is, will we make sure that this resource is fully distributed in the society or not. And we think that's essential that it happen.

We feel the same way in the international arena. More than half the world's people don't have access to a telephone now; but, as the lower earth orbital satellites go up, there will be the ability for the most remote villages in Africa to have access to the Internet. It will be cheaper for them to have that access that way than to build out the telephone system. All you'll need is a local area network with a power source in a village, and then somebody able to train and educate a couple of people to operate it. In fact, it will be easier to maintain than the telephone system. Now I don't mean to minimize the difficulties of that, but in our view, we need to put on a major effort to ensure that the building out occurs. So, we are undertaking a major initiative with respect to the World Bank and some of aid organizations elsewhere to try to make that occur.

A second issue, which is probably the greatest concern to me, is that as the new digital economy comes, much as with the industrial economy when it came, there are going to be tens of millions of jobs lost, and tens of millions of jobs created. There'll be losses in areas like retailing, middle-men type functions, insurance agents, travel agents, and so on. There will be gains in information technology-related industries--design industries, media industries. The good news is that the jobs created will, on average, be higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs than the ones lost. The bad news will be that, if our people aren't educated enough and if we don't have a sufficient re-training program in this society, our people won't be able to take those new jobs. Right now, our educational systems and training systems are woefully inadequate to do that, and I think that is my greatest concern that we are not now facing.

Let me address one more issue, which I know is the issue that you've been discussing for most of today and probably tomorrow. That issue is the effect on media on the political process. Personally, when I first came to Washington, I remember there was a profile written of me--I think it was in the "Washington Post" magazine--and there were one or two critical comments in it. Objectively, by and large, it was probably a very positive article. I think it said I was humorless or I didn't have much of a personality, which I took great umbrage at. Now if that was what was said about me in a newspaper article, I'd bring it up as the best article that's ever written. At that time, it probably was the best profile ever written about me, but I took great umbrage at that time.

One of the things I've learned, and I think it's something that we all are going to have to learn in the digital age, is that we're going to have thicker skins. Things that would have gone as gossip behind your backs will now be publicly available to everybody. Actually, I think it's probably better to see what people are saying directly than to have it be behind your back. Personally, I welcome this. I don't think it's a bad thing that there is going to be thousands and thousands of information sources. When you try to do something, particularly if you try to do something in a public arena, it's going to be commented upon in chat-rooms, posted in discussion groups and so on. I also don't think it's a bad thing that there will be all kinds of rumor mills and things posing as news activities which are just based on rumor and some outright intending-to-be slanderous or whatever. Having observed close up how the media is working now, including reputable newspapers and other sources that we all rely on, I don't think that's a bad thing either.

In many respects, I was one of the more--I was going to say "most"--naive people coming to Washington with this Administration. I had been in the private sector all my life, and this was my first job in Washington. And one of the things I was very naive about is when I picked up some of our more credible newspapers and read them when I was living in Rhode Island, I just assumed what I read was correct; I just assumed it was correct if it was in the "New York Times" or "Washington Post." One of the things I learned in Washington is that's not true at all.

The pressures that reporters are under in terms of deadlines, the way in which the spin game works, and the way in which the leak game works means that reporting is quite often inaccurate. When it's inaccurate, it's not malicious or anything. Most reporters are trying to do the best they can. Some of them are more successful at it than others, just like in any field of endeavor. I think most sincerely want to try to do it right and get it objective, but the nature of the way the process works means that that's not often the case. Given that, to my way of thinking, it's better to have more and more sources out there, and let people judge for themselves what they find credible and what they don't. If that means that as a public official you get whacked more often, so what? I mean, that's just part of the game and you need to accept it, understand it, and just move on. I don't find that offensive anymore, and I find it just part of what you sign up for when you go into public life.

I think what will be interesting is that some news organizations, if they're going to continue to command the revenue streams and the audiences that they've been used that they have been used to traditionally, they are going to have to find ways to brand credibility. That will be an interesting challenge for some of them. Having been in business strategy for 20 years--I'd often talk to a business where there was a fundamental change in their industry occurring and the business was being threatened, and the business would say, "but I have this great value, and the consumer will see that." I remember sitting with mini-computer companies who said, "the personal computer, yeah, OK, but my mini-computer can do things that personal computer can never do." They just didn't want to admit that they had to fundamentally change. That's a common phenomenon in business. In sitting with a lot of news organizations and reporters in Washington who were talking about the Internet press, which they look down on, they say, "sure people will pay to read my stories, because I give more in-depth analysis, or I give my judgment." It doesn't ring too true to me in many cases. The public is not necessarily going to accept that.

So, I think there's going to have to be fundamental changes, and I don't think it's a bad thing that we'll have more and more sources. I also think there will be more openness, and I think that's a good thing. One of the things we did with our electronic commerce strategy, which broke new ground in the White House, is that we posted the first draft of our paper on the Internet for comment. It took about a month or two of argument for me to get agreement to do that, but I finally did. We went through l8 drafts and treated it as a virtual document; we got in comments; we made revisions, and so on. We heard from hundreds of people you'd never hear from normally in a White House/Federal Register comment process, and there were about 50 or 60 suggestions we got from the Internet traffic which were very good that we incorporated them. We got some of the comments you'd expect, like "the best thing you could do is die," and so on. But a lot of what we got was very useful and constructive. Now, we've done that with everything. All our papers are posted; they all go through revisions; it's all open. And, you know, guess what? The people who said, "Life as we know it will come to an end if you open up the decision-making processes were wrong." It's been very effective, and it hasn't hampered anything. I think the openness that's going to be brought is a positive thing. Obviously, there are certain national security areas and things of this sort where people's lives can be in jeopardy and so on, where you have to keep a process that's not open. But I think that for most policy-making, I think you can have an open process.

Finally, let me just conclude by saying what I started by saying, which is that I don't think any of us understand where all of this is headed. It is part of what leads us to be taking a cautious approach. We're being very successful, in the sense that we think we are going to conclude agreements in the next few months that are going to have a moratorium on taxation on the Internet and electronic commerce, and we're not going to get the kind of database restrictions that some had proposed, so I think it's going to be a balanced, intellectual-property protection. I hope and think we're going to get a duty-free zone on the Internet. We're moving to privatize the technical management of the Internet, and I think that's going to work well. We're moving to a paradigm there where we're essentially saying we're not going to have inter-governmental organizations like the International Telecommunications Union governing the Internet. Instead, what we're going to have is de-centralized, private, non-profit bodies--stakeholder-based--like the Internet Engineering Task Force or the Internet Architecture Board or this new non-profit that will be set up for the domain name system, not some centralized governing body. I think we are going to succeed in moving ahead in getting this private-sector led privacy protection regimes in place. There's moves now that we think are real that will cause that to happen in the coming months.

So we're succeeding in a whole number of these areas. But the final word I'll leave you with is that despite all that, we have to be very humble about it all because we don't really understand it. We need to keep a very broad, consultative process going and enough flexibility to keep changing as the technology and the market teaches things. Let me stop there. I'm looking forward to hearing the commentators, and then we can have a discussion. (APPLAUSE)