CAMBRIDGE, Mass. The empires of the future will be

     empires of the mind.

IN THE 64 YEARS since Winston Churchill spoke those words in Harvard Yard, digital information has become as important to world commerce as durable goods.

Digitized thoughtstuff — voices and texts and numbers, images and inventions and ideas — drive economic and political progress everywhere. The enabling technologies — the microprocessor, the personal computer, the fiber-optic cable and the Internet — all started here. Other countries are now challenging America’s leadership in technological innovation. The next administration will be faced with tough questions about America’s information technology future, questions with no easy answers.

• American children lag the global competition in mathematical and scientific knowledge. A technologically illiterate workforce will be a risk to the nation. Has the time come for a national science, technology and mathematics curriculum?

Local control of educational programs has contributed to the widely varying levels of educational achievement by children of different states. Can we still afford to let state authorities decide what science and mathematics their schoolchildren should learn? Can the borderless Internet itself help equalize educational opportunities for the nation’s children, opportunities that now vary by both geography and socioeconomic status?

• The Internet is both a “hunting ground for child predators,” as one congresswoman described it, and also “the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed,” in the words of a federal judge. Before Congress is a law that would require many school libraries to block students’ unsupervised use of social-networking sites such as My-Space. Opposition to the bill comes from members of Congress who fear that it would block educational resources such as Wikipedia, which are also based on peer contributions. The conflicting ideals of enlightenment and protection echo past struggles over what books schoolchildren should be able to read.

Which is a more important role for government — to protect cyberspace as an open informational resource, or to obstruct children’s passageways into it? In the same vein, how should we view the Federal Communication Commission’s recent push for a free-to-the-public wireless but fully censored Internet — a government-monitored network guaranteed to exclude anything that “would be harmful to teens and adolescents” (that is, “children ages 5 through 17”)?

• Government regulation of commerce is generally resisted in free societies, but may sometimes be wise nonetheless. For example, railroads were long ago designated “common carriers,” prohibited from choosing their passengers on criteria other than willingness to pay. Because telephone companies are also “common carriers,” they cannot, for example, deny service to people who are discussing how to save money on phone calls. When the government is the carrier, the Bill of Rights restricts interference in the transport of ideas. The U.S. Postal Service cannot without cause open our mail. Delivery services follow the same policy — customers of UPS, for example, take it for granted that their parcels won’t be opened and inspected in transit.

What about Internet communications? Internet-service providers are mostly private enterprises — telephone and cable television companies, for example. In an effort to develop premium Internet services, they are starting to monitor the data packets they deliver, and to favor some kinds of information over others. They may even alter the data en route, so the receiving computer can no longer be confident that what it is receiving is the same as what was sent. Should this kind of monitoring and manipulation be allowed as a natural development in the free market for Internet services, or should it be prohibited by law in the interest of communication privacy and reliable access to all Internet services?

• The Internet can be a medium of thought control as well as enlightenment. Chinese censorship of the Internet supplies dramatic examples — information about events in Tibet, for example, is heavily filtered within Chinese borders. How should the U.S. government regard American businesses that equip foreign governments with the digital tools required for intellectual and political oppression?

A version of the same issue arises domestically as well. Search engines are supplied by private companies, which are not obliged to explain why some results are more highly ranked than others. Should the government monitor or regulate the fairness of search results, on which the general public increasingly relies?

• Virtually every business operating on the Web can improve its services and increase its profits by keeping track of what its customers are doing — what they are searching for and what pages they have viewed, for example. Have companies fulfilled their obligations to the public by disclosing what records they are keeping and why? Or are government regulations needed to protect consumer privacy and to limit the sharing of this information with other businesses or with government agencies?

• The U.S. considers itself the world’s greatest democracy, but U.S. citizens mistrust their government and vote in small numbers. How can the Internet increase the transparency of government operations, the accountability of government officials and the participation of citizens in self-government? Can the World Wide Web be exploited to bolster the people’s confidence that their government is of, by and for them?

The candidates for president and for Congress should tell us what they think. Voters deserve to know what kind of “empire of the mind” the candidates hope to lead.

Hal Abelson is professor of computer science and engineering at MIT. Ken Ledeen is CEO of Nevo Technologies. Harry Lewis is professor of computer science at Harvard and Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Together they are the authors of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (bitsbook.com).