Marc Andreessen on encryption and CDA

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

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/