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Mr. Kristol was not surprised, then, that neither Netscape nor Microsoft took to heart the recommendation that browsers block cookies unless instructed not to. He acknowledged that there was little he could do to persuade companies to adopt the voluntary standards. "There's no Internet police going around knocking on doors and saying, `Excuse me — the software you're using doesn't follow I.E.T.F. standards.' "

By then, Mr. Montulli said he had drifted away from the process, saying that the working group had, in fact, called for the kinds of technical changes that companies would not comply with. "I was hoping we'd get some kind of incremental improvement" out of the working group, he said — ideas like the cookie control mechanisms he was working into new versions of the browser.

"But what the new standard required," he said, "was that you start over."

To Mr. Montulli, the conflict came down to the differences between pure researchers like Mr. Kristol and commercial engineers like himself. "The cold reality of the software business is you have to ship something that's good enough and get it out there," he said. "That's the way you ship software, and hopefully make money. If you wait forever trying to make something perfect, you may never ship."

In an article that Mr. Kristol prepared for Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, the journal of the leading computer science professional organization, he said several factors kept him on his somewhat quixotic task. On one level, "I simply wanted to see the effort through to an appropriate completion," he said. But in his paper, Mr. Kristol — who recently retired from Bell Laboratories — writes, "Feeling I was being bullied" by the industry "made me more determined to persist, and I didn't like to see an attempt to bully the I.E.T.F., either."

If nothing else, the effort raised the visibility of the issues underlying cookies, Mr. Kristol said. Thanks in part to his group's work, he said, companies can't violate consumer privacy, or even appear to, without attracting unwelcome attention.

He cited the controversy that arose when DoubleClick announced in 1999 that it had bought Abacus Direct, a company that maintained a database of the buying habits of 88 million catalog shoppers, and planned to match and merge some of the data that it was collecting online with the offline data from Abacus. The resulting data trove would portray millions of consumers' habits at a level of detail unparalleled in its intimacy.

A Public Outcry

Public outcry over the plan was fierce, and the Federal Trade Commission began an inquiry into the company's practices. DoubleClick abandoned the plan, and the Federal Trade Commission dropped its inquiry. DoubleClick's chief privacy officer, Jules Polonetsky, said, "Companies are learning from the missteps of the past year, and are obligated to bake privacy into the infrastructure of their new products lest they face the wrath of the critics."

Mr. Montulli, now 30, has since gained a measure of fame — not just as the inventor of the cookie, but also as one of People magazine's runners- up for "sexiest man alive" in 1999. He says that he has dialed back from the 120-hour work weeks at Netscape — a punishing life that contributed to the breakup of his marriage to the daughter of Netscape's founder, Jim Clark, in 1997.

He left Netscape in 1998, a millionaire many times over thanks to the company's high-flying stock. He helped to create epinions.com, a site for comparison shopping, but has since left that company as well.

Ask about his latest achievement, and he talks about climbing Mt. Shasta with his girlfriend, Ashley Dearruigunaga — and, at the summit, asking her to marry him. ("At 14,162 feet, I figured she couldn't say no," he said.)

When it comes to cookies, he says that he is satisfied with the way things have worked out. Even though he does not favor the use of third- party cookies, he calls the existence of third-party cookies "the best possible error," because "the only way it could be exploited is by someone who is extremely public, who is extremely large and who has a very long reach" — a company, in other words, that cannot afford a public relations fiasco, he said.

Over time, the views on cookies from privacy advocates have evolved. Richard M. Smith, the chief technology officer for the Privacy Foundation, a think tank in Denver, said that he now believed that most cookies were benign.

"My first reaction was, `Oh they're terrible!' Over the last year and a half as I've looked at the Internet and how it works, it would be very difficult to have the Internet without them."