All the president's man
By Margie Wylie
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

BURLINGAME, California--Ask Ira Magaziner how he got the plum gig of drafting the President's policy on electronic commerce and he'll smile: "I guess I must've stepped on the cat."

Magaziner is only half joking. For most politicians, Internet boosterism is the modern political equivalent of baby kissing, but as Magaziner will be the first to tell you, he's not a politician.

A long-time supporter of President Bill Clinton, Magaziner traces their friendship back to their days as Rhodes scholars at Oxford University some 25 years ago. They later reconnected at a famous "Renaissance Weekend," a salon-like retreat for intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen. Since then, Magaziner has advised the president and worked with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in several capacities, including his highest profile role of all: co-chair of the failed health care reform initiative in Clinton's first term.

Internet commerce is hardly as controversial as health care reform, but Magaziner's policy paper ventures beyond the safe political platitudes about education and wired libraries. Instead, it plows into the middle of clashes between consumers and sellers, and between citizens and nations on some of the toughest issues of the looming electronic economy, such as taxes, encryption, consumer privacy, digital money, and regulation.

The policy paper is a compromise, but it doesn't seem to satisfy anybody, even though it takes a hands-off tack to the Internet. Consumer privacy advocates say it leaves too much up to the free market, only punishing those who violate individual privacy rather than safeguarding their rights in the first place. Business is unhappy with the idea of banking the electronic keys that unlock all their communications in or even near the hands of the government. Law enforcement, of course, wants more access. About the only thing most groups agree on is the call for making the Internet a kind of tax-free trade zone, everyone, that is, but telephone companies, who want Internet service providers to pay access fees as they do.

Magaziner doesn't seem like the brawler he must be to put himself in the middle of this. A passable public speaker, he is so soft-spoken in conversation that people are forced to strain to catch his often refreshingly frank remarks. He keeps his watch set exactly 14 minutes early since his Oxford days, but admits it doesn't keep him on time, as his aide nods vigorously in silent assent. Still, it seems in some ways, Magaziner is ahead of the times. The policy paper proposes nothing less than a new social contract for the coming years. The first draft came out earlier this year, went through an extensive comment period, and is expected to be revised sometime in April.

NEWS.COM sat down with Magaziner before a speech at the Computers Freedom and Privacy 97 conference in Burlingame earlier this month to discuss the future of electronic commerce.

What makes Internet commerce sufficiently different from other types of commerce that it deserves special consideration by the president?
Magaziner: No. 1, is its enormous potential. We think if we allow the Internet to grow, and commerce on the Internet to grow, and create the right kind of environment for it, it will be the largest category of world trade in the next five or ten years. It has enormous potential.

We're thinking about products and services actually delivered across the Internet: things like software, entertainment products, professional consulting services, information, databases, and so on. Increasingly people will be trading and selling and buying those kinds of services and products and the Internet will be a very effective way to do that commerce.

Secondly, Internet commerce defies a lot of the normal conventions. It's truly borderless in terms of states or countries. And it can spawn a creativity that is greater than probably physical commerce. It's something which has the potential to bring education, better health care, better communications among people, more democracy, more freedom. So it's something that we see a tremendous potential in and that the president is very interested in.

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