WASHINGTON — Internet worship is as common in American politics as tarot cards at an astrologers’ convention, and just about as prescient.
Far from being the year that technology revolutionized the presidential race, most Americans unapologetically turned to traditional media for their news. Dot-com firms that planned aggressive coverage of the conventions instead scaled back their efforts, and Voter.com found itself laying off dozens of employees.
While political dot-com firms burned, Washington’s squabbling class was busy doing what it does best: politicking. Technology regulation was debated more than ever before, and 2001 seems certain to follow suit.
Antitrust: Contrary to popular belief, a Republican taking up space in the Oval Office does not necessarily mean a quick end to the Microsoft antitrust suit.
The career attorneys at the Justice Department — who are not political appointees — will likely do their best to nix any settlement that does not exact sufficient humiliation for their corporate foe.
True, President-elect Bush has hardly said complimentary things about the Clinton administration’s prosecution of Microsoft. But the parallel lawsuit filed by state attorneys general will complicate any talk of a settlement.
The states view themselves as more hard-nosed on this point than the Justice Department, and they could simply refuse to end the case out of court.
Even if the Justice Department suddenly becomes antitrust-phobic, the Federal Trade Commission may not. The two agencies share antitrust enforcement, and the FTC is at least nominally independent from the White House. Then again, the current FTC chairman’s term expires in late 2001, and Bush sure won’t be appointing anyone as pro-regulation as Clinton’s picks.
Intellectual property: Few Net-heads like current intellectual property law. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is as widely mocked in geek circles as a velvet Elvis during a showing at the National Gallery. Over the last year, software patents have become perceived not just as annoying, but as downright pernicious.
But the DMCA is not likely to go away anytime soon. Hollywood is as pleased as a Democrat at a Beverly Hills fundraiser about the DMCA. The entertainment industry has used it in a determined — but far-from-successful — attempt to rid the Net of a DVD-descrambling program.
That case, in which U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan sided with eight movie studios, is being appealed and could be headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Free speech: After a brief lull, the Internet porn debate flared up in Washington again this year. Fueled by protect-the-children fervor and presidential politics, it led to Congress approving the first-ever legislation that ties federal funding for schools and libraries to the use of filtering software.
Two federal porn-advisory bodies met in 2000. One created by the Child Online Protection Act [[reported](https://more-deals.info/news/politics/39302/%29%5D%28https://www.wired.com/news/politics/39302/%29%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="paywall">[<a href="https://more-deals.info/news/politics/39302/%22%3EIt%E2%80%99s clear where President-elect Bush stands:](https://more-deals.info/news/politics/39302/)
ed.com/news/politics/2/"> <a href="http://www.cluebot.com/articl ?sid=00/10/18/042235&mode=thread">warned of the dangers</a> of the supposed dark side of the Internet.<br> Conservatives have long pressed the Clinton administration to start Net-obscenity prosecutions, and there’s every indication the presumptive hthe Jus Department, John Ashcroft, will do his best to put online porntrepreneurs behind bars. <p><b>Privacy:</b> This was the first Congress that took privacy seriously. The legacy of the 106th Congress won’t include aggressive privacy legislation — that’ll happen in 2001 — but it does include a growing distru
fth corporations’ data collection practices and the federal government’s surveillance capabilities.</p> <p>Some examples: This year, the Privacy Caucus was formed to regulate the privacy sector, while this fall the House Judiciary Committee took the courageous and unprecedented-in-recent-history step of raising the legal standards required
pce to intercept e-mail. That simply wouldn’t have happened any other time in the last two decades.</p> <p>The Federal Trade Commission is poised to be the United States’ de facto privacy agency. Since at least 1995, FTC staff has been holding what amount to annual privacy summits, and its lawyers have been busy assailing firms that have strayed too far from gove
npproved procedures and veer close to fraud
tp> <p>TTC recently held a one-and-a-half day</p> <a href="https://more-deals.info/news/politics/40623/%22%3Ehea%3Cstrong%3Ea%3E on wireless pri and seems eager to extend its regulatory reach to other areas of technology. <p><b>International law:</b> In 2000, we learned about the Justice Department spearheading an attempt to rally internati
. In Dece, a European official</p> <a href="https://more-deals.info/news/poics/0,1283,40576,00.html%22%3Epredicted%3C/a%3E that priva
rsn’t sfy civil lities groups, which</p> <a href="http://www.gilc.org/privacy/coe-letter-1000.html">oppose</a> the plan. <p>After the Council of Europe’s expert group finalizes the proposed treaty, the full committee of ministers must adopt the text. Then it will be
countries for their signatures, which means that in the United States the Senate must approve it.<br></p>
