Monday, December 15, 2008

This is what you get for trusting the Wall Street Journal, folks

Atrios and K-Drum are all a-twitter over an article in the WSJ about the future of net neutrality. I didn't even bother reading the thing because I assume the WSJ is full of crap 95% of the time, and I'm not wasting my time to filter out the 5%. Short version: I happen to have Lessig right here, and the WSJ is lying about Lessig's views.  Which makes me think they put about as much effort in to the rest of the story.

This really is very simple: Lessig said at a conference recently that large service providers should be able to pay for higher bandwidth, provided that ability is open to everyone. This is what Lessig has always said, and any reporter who's doing reporting on the Internet could have taken 30 seconds to learn both.

Considering the reporter in question seems to have not even bothered to call Lessig to clarify his views, I call bullshit on the entire piece. It's this last bit that's most galling: academics are pretty approachable, and aren't shy about talking when they've changed their minds. If Lessig had, you could have asked him, Kumar and Rhoads.

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