Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

• Author: Pink, Daniel H.

Of the few hundred speeches I wrote while working for Vice President Al Gore, the last one may have been the most significant. I didn't know it at the time. But Esther Dyson did.

Back in july, the president and vice president convened several dozen high-tech luminaries in the White House East Room to announce the administration's policy governing commerce on the Internet. "A Framework for Global Electronic Commerce" declared that government's proper course of action was inaction: that the way to protect the public interest was to let private interests battle it out. In the vice president's remarks that afternoon, I gave him the following line, which he delivered with typical flair. "Our approach to electronic commerce," he said, "must be guided by a digital Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm."' The assembled crowd of computer geeks and digerati applauded lustily, and the vice president soaked up the approval of his fellow cybertravelers. Then he ad-libbed, "I'm not surprised that Esther Dyson is leading the applause'

Dyson had a seat in that audience thanks to her reputation as one of cyberspace's sharpest thinkers (and one of the few women to achieve influence in that male-dominated world). Her newsletter on the computer and Internet industries, Release 1.0, is must reading for the digital elite. Her annual conference, the P.C. Forum, is a greenhouse of new products, hot deals, and fresh gossip. That afternoon, Dyson understood instantly what I realized only later: The public philosophy she embodies, evangelizes, and helped create had triumphed in spectacular fashion.

A Democratic president and vice president -- and a commission headed by Ira Magaziner, late of the Clinton health care plan -- had studied the Internet and declared "hands off." They concluded that this massive network of networks -- the most powerful social and economic phenomenon to emerge in several decades -- was best regulated not by well-intentioned government officials, but by profit-seeking engineers and entrepreneurs. Never before had government evaluated something so fundamental to America's economic and social foundation -- think railroads, highways, or television -- and announced its intention to do pretty much nothing.

Score one for the libertarians.

In Release 2. 0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, Dyson's attempt to decode the Net, she advances the idea that private markets and self-organizing individuals can fashion the Internet's rules and boundaries...