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.

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

As I said in comments to Steve Benen's post, I agree with Matt Stoller that Lessig's position is a bad one, regardless of how long he's held it. If there are high-speed lanes on the Web, regardless of whether they're open to anyone who wants to pay to use them, this has the potential to make the Web a lot more like cable, with most of the bandwidth being taken over by those who'd pay for the high-speed service, and everyone else squeezed into what's left.

[low-tech cyclist]

There may be a legitimate debate about what Google is actually doing: colocating servers with ISPs in the furtherance of 'edge caching' its content. My feeling is that as long as there's no high-speed lane in the 'tubes themselves, it's OK for Google to cooperate with ISPs to put their content nearer to the end user than it would otherwise be. But I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.

[Crissa]

Yeah, Google is paying the same as any other user to host their stuff closer to some set of users.

I don't see this as the same as gating the outgoing/incoming traffic by source.

And there always will be private networks; which is sorta as it should be - if I need a huge amount of data or clean data I'd better be willing to pay for extra wires.

[Crissa]

Err, from my computer to my computer, that is.

[G]

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[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

I don't know for sure whether this helps, but I think that when writing media criticism it may help to put the authors' full names in the title of the post. That way they're likely to see it at some point when they google their names or whatever.