Lawrence Lessig: The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall.html

by twampss • 18 years ago

48 22 18 years ago

wumi• 18 years ago

real transparency in journalism would be, below the title of the WSJ article, an update (a la tech blog like TechCrunch or VentureBeat) and link to Lessig's commentary.

dhimes• 18 years ago

Agreed. Keep in mind it's now Fox news....

mattmaroon• 18 years ago

I'm very glad to see his response to what felt to me like a PR piece sponsored by the telcos.

jmtame• 18 years ago

I sent the authors of that article a pretty nasty letter this morning.

bitdiddle6• 18 years ago

As a reader for more than 25 years, I cancelled my subscription to the WSJ when it recently changed hands and haven't so much a as peeked at it since. Considering it's current ownership I'm not surprised by this distortion

fallentimes3• 18 years ago

Just curious, what do you read instead?

maurycy• 18 years ago

Financial Times? The Economist? New Yorker? There's a lot of decent, event better, magazines and newspapers.

bitdiddle6• 18 years ago

bloomberg mostly. I get financial data from Fidelity.

markessien• 18 years ago

Minds, young one, minds...

steveplace• 18 years ago

I still get it, but they just pile up on my desk. Not as fun to read now that the editorial page is an AEI loudspeaker. Much better content from my reader/tweetdeck.

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

It is pretty hard for someone not deeply immersed in the particular jargon of the debate to understand what Lessig is trying to communicate in his public statements. For example, this quote from Lessig's testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee is quite ambiguous:

"As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew it could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service."

I understand how someone could misread that statement to support the view that Lessig is opposed to tiered content-provider access. I certainly did not get the point that Lessig wanted me to get when I first read his statement.

That said, journalists should try to get these things straight.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

Instead of ranting on his blog, how about writing a nice letter to the editor? Newspapers screw things up all the time. I'm sure they would either a) defend the original story, or 2) issue a retraction.

Instead he wants to have a one-sided conversation. WSJ journal readers deserve better, and his blog readers deserve better. Do the right thing instead of trying to make everything into something that's bigger than what it is.

kragen• 18 years ago

You are making assertions about what the man wants. Have you talked to him about that? Do you have any basis for your defamatory assertion whatsoever, other than observing that the WSJ has not yet published a Letter to the Editor from him?

gasull• 18 years ago

Google response to WSJ art.: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutralit...

Lawrence Lessig: The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal

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