The way Google is protesting this Wall Street Journal story about them and net neutrality would lead one to believe that the NY Post style of just making up a story to please Rupert Murdoch is now standard at the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.
UPDATE: Murdoch malpractice on a global scale.
Thanks so much for posting this, Oliver! (If for no other reason than it also contains a link to the response of Lawrence Lessig, whom I have tremendous respect for, and of whom upon reading the fatuous WSJ piece saying he had “softened his views” on neutrality I thought “WTF?!?!”)
The most likely explanation here is we have reporters who have no real understanding of the technology issues they’re writing about trying to get a story out on deadline. Reporters, in my experience, almost never get science & tech issues right unless they have spent a long time versed in the particular subject. Actually this is probably true about almost any field, not just science (look at our abysmal political reporting).
However in my darker, more cynical moments I consider the following: the WSJ editorial board has long been dogmatically opposed to net neutrality: they basically shallowly see it as “high-tech Communism” enforced by “intrusive government regulation” in the otherwise brilliant free market which totally invented the Internet ya know. Add in that the WSJ is now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and double down the previous sentence (considering I’m sure old Rupe would love to be able to prioritize Fox News feeds over everybody else on a non-neutral internet).
Therefore, in the Sun Tzu theory of sowing confusion among your enemies, I wonder if there might be a soupçon of “Let’s sow some dissension and bad feeling in the ranks of the pro-neutrality coalition” going on here?