Present at the Creation

_The new very broadband high capacity networks . . . ought to be built by the federal government and then transitioned into private industry._ --Vice President-elect Al Gore, at the December 1992 postelection economic summit in Little Rock   _Private sector leadership accounts for the explosive growth of the Internet today, and the success of electronic commerce will depend on continued private sector leadership._ --"A Framework for Electronic Commerce" (July 1997), a White House policy paper written by Ira Magaziner with advice from Vice President Gore's staff   It was an extraordinary turnabout. In the space of the four and a half years between these two statements, the most technology-literate administration in American history reversed itself on one of the century's more important technological questions. It wasn't a political change of heart that turned Bill Clinton and Al Gore around but a recognition that they were dealing with something vastly greater than they had imagined only a few years earlier. And that "something greater" now urgently confronts the United States and other countries with important choices.

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