According to the Wall Street Journal, nine Internet firms (AOL, Amazon.com, Yahoo, eBay, Excite@Home, DoubleClick, Inktomi, theglobe.com, and Lycos) have formed a Washington lobbying group. The purpose is to focus on issues of concern to Internet companies. The article does list privacy regulation as a concern of the group; it does not list encryption, which strikes me as an obvious choice. It is possible that this group will be quite influential, especially if more online firms join. To the extent that our employers are or may become involved, we may want to lobby internally to make sure that the group does the right thing about encryption. (There are also privacy issues; those are largely out of charter for this group, so I'll say no more on that subject here.)
