Sure, there are still the ardent enthusiasts here, but most of us are a lot more restrained. Several factors have dampened the government's enthusiasm for the Net. First, the take-up of the Internet and other services was not as strong as ministers were led to believe it would be. Then there was the bursting of the dotcom bubble on the world's stock markets. Last autumn's US presidential election suggests that the Net was not as influential a campaigning tool as had been forecast.
Ministers believe that it has unnecessarily alienated large numbers of older voters.
Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, ministers have found themselves ground down by the thorny issues of regulation, crime, competitiveness and taxation that have dogged each decision they have attempted on Internet policy. They allowed themselves to get caught up in a hubristic tide. The problem reflects a bigger tension at the heart of New Labour. Blair and his advisers spent the 1990s looking for a new ideology. It was not enough simply to portray the Third Way as the middle ground between the free market and socialism.