From: Tom Whore (tomwhore@inetarena.com)
Date: Mon Oct 02 2000 - 11:03:05 PDT
Thursday September 28 1:22 AM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic
presidential nominee Al Gore (news - web sites), musing about the role of
government in the age of the Internet in an interview released Wednesday,
likened U.S. democracy to an early version of Napster, the controversial
company that lets fan swap songs for free.
``Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software
for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our
people,'' Gore told technology magazine Red Herring in a lengthy
interview. ``The American democratic system was an early political version
of Napster,'' he said in the interview. A text was released on Wednesday
evening.
... ...
These days, with technological advances, individual citizens had
access to more information than ever before, but even in a ``completely
wired nation,'' Gore argued that representative democracy was still a
valid concept.
``Good decisions do not result from simply consuming data and spitting out
conclusions,'' he told Red Herring. ``You would still want representatives
to be chosen who have time to reflect and make considered judgements The
vice president underscored his deep interest in technology and again
denied that he had ever claimed to have invented the Internet, but said he
was proud about his role in pushing for creation of the ``information
superhighway.''
Gore also said he believed U.S. leadership on Internet policy issues had
been sound and said he continued to support a three-to-five year
moratorium on Internet taxation.
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