[5101] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Internet lobbying group
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Bellovin)
Mon Jul 12 13:30:17 1999
From: Steve Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 16:41:15 +0200
According to the Wall Street Journal, nine Internet firms (AOL, Amazon.com,
Yahoo, eBay, Excite@Home, DoubleClick, Inktomi, theglobe.com, and Lycos) have
formed a Washington lobbying group. The purpose is to focus on issues of
concern to Internet companies. The article does list privacy regulation as a
concern of the group; it does not list encryption, which strikes me as an
obvious choice.
It is possible that this group will be quite influential, especially if more
online firms join. To the extent that our employers are or may become
involved, we may want to lobby internally to make sure that the group does the
right thing about encryption. (There are also privacy issues; those are
largely out of charter for this group, so I'll say no more on that subject
here.)
