And what can we expect from Mr. Gore on the issue of intellectual property rights? Right now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is pushing as hard as it can for the public to accept patents on business methods.

We have patents on methods of Internet auctions, patents on one-click shopping, patents on methods of picking stocks, patents on methods of avoiding taxes on credit card transactions, patents on methods of political campaigning on the Internet, and even patents on Internet Web standards.

Mastercard has foolishly sued me, claiming their trademark rights can stop my use of parody in political ads, including using the word "priceless" itself.

There are lawsuits over hypertext links in Web pages. The Girl Scouts are told to pay royalties on campfire songs. Trade-secret laws are now a federal criminal offense. Students have been thrown in jail for refusing to turn patents over to giant corporations who fund university facilities.

I am opposed to patents on software, and opposed to patents on business methods. I believe that parody should be protected in copyright and trademark, that copyright enforcement should not override privacy rights, and that use of patents, trademarks and copyrights should be limited by fair use, and when necessary, compulsory licenses.

The public domain should be protected, and public figures need to speak out against the ever-escalated march of corporate lobbying for expanding intellectual property rights.

There is finally the issue of the privatization of law and policy making on the Internet, and the easy way that Mr. Gore has pushed for the elimination of democratic institutions. The creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is at the center of the Clinton/Gore Internet strategy.

ICANN is a nonprofit organization that is largely controlled by corporate interests. The initial board for ICANN was largely picked by then-IBM executive Roger Cochetti. The majority of ICANN's board is controlled by a handful of structures that are controlled by corporate interests. The ICANN board and Clinton/Gore administration officials claim this is a feature, not a flaw.

What is ICANN, and what will it do? That is the interesting question. Right now ICANN is using its power to protect big corporate trademark interests.

The next issue will be copyright, as ICANN considers corporate proposals to use the ICANN control over domain names and IP numbers, to become an ever-ambitious police for alleged intellectual property infringements. In the trademark areas, ICANN is already throwing concepts such as fair use or free speech out the window. Mostly, however, it is an issue of corporate privatization.

ICANN is a private government. It isn't the same as no government. It is a government where regular people either can't vote or will never be able to elect a majority (in the current election, ICANN will only permit five of its 19 board members to be elected by Internet users).

These are really only a few of the information society issues confronting citizens today. People can think about these issues, and ask themselves, will Vice President Gore stand up for their interests as citizens, consumers or owners of small businesses, or will he protect powerful corporate interests?

If you truly believe Mr. Gore is your friend and your advocate on these issues, then make him take a stand for users and consumers on these fast-emerging issues and (stop) fronting for autocratic interests over the Internet.

The Gore Campaign’s Response

First, if you think some other public official deserves more credit than Al Gore for repealing the paradigm of monopoly and implementing instead a competitive blueprint for the American and international communications sector, who would it be? Certainly not any Republican. Virtually every initiative -- from unbundling to exemption from interstate access charges – that has promoted data and the Internet was opposed by the greater part of the Republican Congress. Certainly not any member of the Green Party -- a group virtually absent from this hugely important shift in policy.

Second, if you think that the policy of competition has not promoted the success of open code and open-system business models, then you are at odds with every single CEO in the software and hardware worlds. Indeed, without a robust competition model, such business models are doomed; regulated monopolies do not adopt open models.

Third, if you think that the American-style competition model is not materially related to the Internet as a mass-market phenomenon, then not only do you disagree with all academic work on this topic, but you also overlook the most obvious facts about the Internet in America today: It is cheap; it is marketed by more than 5,000 different providers; it flourishes under the umbrella of protection from the subsidy-giving and subsidy-taking schemes that historic policy has layered onto the voice networks of every country; it is unlicensed; and it benefits from a host of pro-competitive and pro-Internet regulations, including but not limited to unbundled loops, reciprocal compensation, information services categorization and many others.

None of this is by accident; all is spelled out in my book, You Say You Want A Revolution. And not one step down this path was taken by anyone more boldly or with more vision and commitment than was shown by Al Gore. You can look it up.

Of course, the fact that the multiple protocols that create the Web experience are shared is one of the key reasons for the widespread adoption of the Net. And yet it is also true that the code that constitutes MS-DOS has also had widespread adoption.

What is the difference? The Internet flourishes in a competitive market; that is, what Windows does not inhabit. Please think about this: Competition, not standards-mandating regulation, is the key to maintaining the growth and inclusion of the Net.

You talk about the breakup of AT&T as if it were the mother or father of all sound competition policy. But -- and here I resort to the learning of 17 years of practicing antitrust law – the breakup of AT&T did not lead to competition in the local telephony market, or to competition among data carriers, or to competition in software. It had an effect largely limited to the long-haul voice market, today an industry in its last stages. It would not have been useful or practical to break up the Bell companies. Many small telephone companies in fact already exist; only in rare cases do they face serious competition.

Whether a telco is large or small is largely irrelevant to whether it does or does not face competition. That competition exists if government actively insists on unbundling and interconnection. No federal government has ever more actively pressed those two points -- in the face of virtually unceasing Republican congressional opposition and many recalcitrant courts -- than the Gore-led administration. Entrepreneurs, startups and customers are the beneficiaries.

So is the entire economy: These startups are pushing productivity-generating technologies into every small and large business in the country. These startups are the distribution agents of the economic efficiencies that are keeping our wealth-creating economy going at record pace. No one in public life has done more than Al Gore to promote this market economy; no one can even name another public official who has done remotely as much.

You raise the open-access issue, again embracing the Disney argument that because a cable company unlawfully and briefly did not carry a broadcast TV show, it therefore follows that a new regime of regulating Internet access should be invented and applied, presumably to any and all bandwidth companies. I might call this overreaction -- or an excessive attachment to Regis Philbin.

But if we really wanted the most number of people in the United States to have a crack at being a millionaire -- i.e., if we want to maximize value creation -- it would not be by expanding to the Internet space the clear obligation of cable companies to carry broadcast. Rather, we would promote competition and investment in alternative bandwidth providers.

We should always prefer robust competition over monopoly-encouraging regulation. Because that is what the open-access debate is really about beneath the surface: letting cable monopolists perpetuate monopolies in return for granting access to a powerful few, such as the estimable and effective Disney. I assure you that if the cable companies could obtain monopoly status in return for granting open access, they would do so. That is what they did in the 1984 Cable Act, which in turn led to record increases in cable prices, which in turn led to the mandate for me, at the FCC, to check those price increases, which I did, until the Republican Congress stripped us of that authority in 1996.

Exactly why Mr. Nader is bent on doing all he can -- whether or not intended -- to deliver us into the grip of another, more strengthened Republican government still leaves me dumbfounded. If he is successful (which I hope and believe he will not be) and if Al Gore truly is not elected, then not only I but history will record Mr. Nader's campaign not as a personal frolic or a ventilation of issues, but as a disastrous adventure that led to the frustration of virtually every goal sought by Mr. Nader during his justly renowned career.

As to privacy issues, I have said before and say again that a new paradigm for privacy protection should be the subject of federal legislation. There can be no doubt that a Democratic
White House and Democratic Congress can make this happen, and that a Republican Congress will pervert those goals.

As to Al's vision, and my job, of putting the Internet in every classroom, Mr. Nader somewhat cavalierly says, "This isn't a lot for an eight-year legacy." Actually, putting the Internet in every classroom is a job only 65 percent done, so it's worse than Mr. Nader says: Its a 10-year effort at least.

But is it a lot or a little for Al Gore to have taken the essential initiative to create: 1) the largest new national program for K-12 education in the last 20 years; 2) the fastest-spreading innovation in education since chalk; 3) a platform for new training, curriculum, charter schools, individualized testing, new business models, online community creation, tutoring, and addressing disabilities; and 4) obtaining the greatest amount of participation from local school districts ever (nearly 90 percent)? To me, it is a lot. It certainly took a lot of effort --- not a bit of which came from Mr. Nader, I add with regret.

Mr. Nader also states with insouciance "putting existing government information on the Internet should be the easy part."

Really, almost no business thinks so. No one involved in XML thinks so. It is an idea easy to state and very difficult to implement. Yet, in reality, no one in public office has so vigorously and effectively accomplished so much "on-lining" as Al Gore. At the FCC, just as an example, following Al's leadership we took an agency that operated under cover of Stygian Washingtonian darkness and exposed its decisions, data, speeches and debates to everyone on the Net. Literally millions of hits testify to our success.

I did not find this easy. It took extra appropriations, changing the agency culture, working with the bar and long hours of unpaid overtime with the staff. But we got the job done. Frankly, as opposed to the somewhat contemptuous disregard of the degree of difficulty of the task blithely stated by Mr. Nader, a simple "thank you" would be appropriate. Beyond that, a vote for Al Gore -- who made this happen -- rather than a whimsical protest ballot for Ralph Nader would be a way to make a contribution to openness and progress in our society.

As to the open-source movement, let me put it this way: You write the federal legislation you want to make this flourish and then decide. Would you rather try to persuade George W. Bush or Al Gore to commit the time and energy and political capital to making it pass? This is indeed an easy question to answer. I don't have any doubt about the positive direction of Al Gore's policies in this respect.

But who has done the hard work of actually writing such proposed legislation? Like code, it is easier to talk about than write. But let's do it and do it together, starting right after the election, assuming the country selects -- of the two candidates with a chance to win -- the only one who actually would engage on the relevant issues.

I understand this debate is now concluded. I honor Mr. Nader and consider it a privilege to have had this exchange. I am deeply worried when I think in particular about my own attitude toward presidential elections in 1968 and 1972, when I was in my salad days and was green of years.

I did not think then that elections mattered so much and I indulged in the cynical view that if candidates didn't say and do everything I wanted on every topic, they didn't deserve my support. I know now what I didn't know then: I know now to commit with enthusiasm to causes, to forgive the bumps and dips of the path of progress, and to fight on toward goals by following leaders who I have learned with time will get us to those goals. Such a leader is Al Gore.

If you want his clothes to be of a different color or his jokes to be funnier or his comments from a lectern to be either a little lighter or a little more accessible, then -- to be honest – get over it. Al cannot please all of the people all of the time. But he is who he is: the most qualified, most visionary, most skilled, most caring person who has a reasonable chance to be president of the United States in this election.

To pass on that for any reason and to entrust the presidency instead to someone who has never given any indication of awareness of Mr. Nader's agenda -- much less any sympathy or sensitivity to it -- and who would disappoint in the extreme every one of Mr. Nader's followers, would not be a blunder, but a tragedy.