A blast from the past today if you click here and peruse the Dole/Kemp website from 1996. A highlight about the Internet:

Bill Clinton believes in bureaucratic micro-management of the information economy.

• Within his first 100 days as President, Bill Clinton proposed the Clipper Chip — a secret government-controlled encryption algorithm — and a companion key escrow system where two government agencies would hold a copy of the keys for every Clipper user. Since then Bill Clinton has released updated versions of encryption proposals which insist that the government hold a key to individual’s private data communications.
• The Clinton Administration’s Internet Task Force has proposed legislation that would reduce the rights of users of copyrighted material if that information is used on the Internet. Their infamous “NII White Paper” ignored important court decisions which balance the rights of information users with those of information creators.

Funnies aside, this was an interesting aside note about this site:

The Dole for President campaign today launched its general election Web site — the first political Web site to individually-customize itself for each user’s interests, home state, and last visit.

When users first visit the site, they are given the option of setting up a custom Dole Web page. Each custom page contains a personal tool bar that welcomes the user by name, alerts them to an electronic “In Box” containing any new press releases or other campaign materials posted since their last visit, directs them to briefing papers on issues in which they expressed interest, and offers a home-state icon for local information about the Clinton record and the Dole agenda in that state.

This was in response to this Bill Gates quote: “There’s no doubt we’ll look back at Web sites today and basically say … that they were quite primitive. They don’t customize what they present to the viewers’ interests. They don’t remember: Have you been there before? What have you seen before? And that’s got to change.”