For an account of the US political approach toward the 'net, interactivity, etc as personified by Al Gore and Newt Gingrich refer to 'The Politics of Technology' by John Heilemann in the UK edition of 'Wired', December '95. This essay details at some length the history and divergence of Republican and Democrat approaches to legislating for the Internet.

I have included a few relevant quotations below:

"...(there) was the same fear: that the House bill (for telecoms reforms) "promotes mergers and concentration of power... allowing fewer people to control greater numbers of tv, radio, and newspaper outlets in every community."

"...Gore has never suggested that government should control cyberspace. He has suggested that government should support the backbone of the Net, but has always (at least when pressed) made clear that the infobahn would be built by the private sector. His superhighway imagery was meant to convey another concept altogether: that, just as the concrete highway system had linked the nation and spurred its unprecedented economic growth in the post-World War II years, so would the infobahn be socially binding and economically essential in the information age.

(...)

But if Gore's vision is far from the Rooseveltian, it is equally remote from the Newtonian. Like Gingrich, Gore sees the computer industry as a marvel. But if the goal is to replicate its fierce competitiveness and innovation in the vast, emerging information marketplace, then Gore believes that simply tearing down regulations is not enough. He worries that giant entrench monopolies will roll over smaller rivals. He suspects that consumerswill be gouged along the way. And he frets that the worst off will be left out.

So, Gore clings to the idea that government can prevent his fears from coming true. From the earliest days ... he has argued that the federal approach should be to deregulate as quickly as possible, but only if and when it serves a handful of core goals: to encourage private investment; to make certain that there is, as Gore puts it, "not the illusion of competition, not the distant prospect of competition, but real competition" in the bit business; to ensure open access; to deal with the dilemma of information haves and have-nots."

(p102-104)

{Incidentally, with regard to the first quote above you may not have heard of him, but there's this guy by the name of Bill Gates - clever chap, bought up an operating system called QDOS, stands for Quick and Dirty, seems to be quite a popular system, must be if it's on 90% of the world's computers.....}

For 'BillWatch', a website with regular updates
on US digital regulation changes, click below:

For HotWired's archive on digital privacy in
the US, click below:

further: