in response to the Atrios post here

I'm a big admirer of Atrios (Duncan) and hope he doesn't think I'm being picky. But he doesn't have it quite right as to the past; yes as to the future.

As to the history, the way it was was this way: The entrenched interests were not interested enough or entrenched enough in the Internet space (old usage) to fight hard enough to have their way with the Internet. But all along we (yes, including very much Al Gore, but also Grove, Gates, Yang, Cerf, Schmidt, Magaziner, and many others) focused very hard on making sure that it was deemed to be very good sense not to stop the Internet.

That's why we had Bill Clinton and Al Gore stringing telephone lines for a classroom in California on Net Day (a Gore idea). That's why we celebrated when Senators Snowe and Rockefeller authorized the FCC to spend $2 billion a year providing matching grants for school districts to install internet access in classrooms. That's why we told the local phone companies they could not charge extra to those who used telephone lines to connect to the Internet for unlimited usage at costs to the companies far higher than what voice calls caused. That's why we subsidized internet access providers in various purposeful ways.

We knew very clearly at all times that the Internet would become, if government let it, the common medium for not only the United States but the whole world. We knew it would disrupt every existing business model and that the only way to keep the pushback from winning was to hurry up and have the Internet get big quick. And we also knew that multistakeholder, non-governmental governance was the unicorn of policy: totally great and utterly impossible to find except possibly just this one time in the Narnia of the Internet.

That didn't make us smart: the technologists made us smart enough. We were lucky enough to listen to them; Al had been listening to them for years. And to see the Internet community now be big and strong enough to win a lobbying battle is something that we hoped then would be true by now.