Government is evil. Stupid, too.

That sums up the attitude in the on-line world. Netizens assume the government will misunderstand the Internet and regulate it badly. Even worse, they worry the government may be hyperaggressive, eventually taxing anything it can get its hands on.

In fact, the Feds have taken pains not to barge into e-commerce and not to impose new taxes. When I worked on Internet business issues at the White House from 1996 to 1997, the president's guiding principle was, "First, do no harm." With something as unprecedented as the Net, we recognized that it would be only too easy to foul the works. So, the White House decided it should be largely up to the private sector to supervise electronic commerce.

My boss, Ira Magaziner, insisted on open interchange with the broad public as we drafted what became known as the "Framework for Global Electronic Commerce," a top-level policy statement that President Clinton officially endorsed in its final form last November. Ira—who had faced criticism over the health-care reform initiative that he co-led in 1993-94 with Hillary Rodham Clinton—recognized that knowledge of the latest and greatest in Internet technology was not resident at the White House. So we talked to the full spectrum of the informed and the interested—and Ira's visitor log grew thicker than the guestbook at a Nantucket B&B. We talked to executives in the electronic vanguard, technical experts of all stripes, and consumer advocates. We talked to civil libertarians and apprehensive foreign government officials. A cynical lobbyist could find himself in Ira's waiting room sitting alongside a wide-eyed idealist.

We kept our baloney detectors switched on. I raised my eyebrows when Tim Koogle, chief executive of Yahoo, said he would one day have the most powerful brand on the Internet. Remember, Yahoo didn't seem terribly viable back in 1996, and it certainly didn't have much presence—the Yahoo meeting happened in its offices, which featured oversized purple chairs and conference rooms named for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (We met in Pestilence, as I recall.) But, as it turns out, what he and other optimists said wasn't so off-base.

We distilled the issues and drafted a policy. Then we did something that shook up a lot of people: We posted our working paper on the Internet and solicited comments from the public at large. Thousands poured in.

Did the policy change 180 degrees? Of course not. But the public response gave us an enriched, more persuasive view that others could make their own. Rather than barging in, we wanted our influence to seep in. And that seems to have happened. Our hands-off approach to regulating and taxing the Internet has set the tone both within the U.S. and overseas. At a meeting in Germany of the G7, which comprises the world's seven major economic powers, I was delighted to hear an official from the generally protectionist Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry advocate free flows of electronic commerce—in language taken nearly verbatim from our working draft.

Stateside, federal agencies have adopted our approach of querying ordinary Americans on the Internet, rather than requiring them to dig up copies of the Federal Register and write in. Other agencies have noted how our working group broadened its base of support by confronting thorny but fundamental issues, such as taxes and tariffs, while carefully ignoring divisive but peripheral concerns, such as on-line gambling and spam.

Ira has finished his job and moved on, but the godfathers to the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce remain in office: Vice President Al Gore, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Ron Pitofsky, and Commerce Secretary Bill Daley. And still supporting them are scores of unseen bricklayers of public policy whose satchels carry dog-eared copies of Wired, Coke-stained reports from the Aspen Institute, and other hallmarks of market-oriented Netizens. Surely, these are good signs.