WaPo Still Screwing Up

The Washington Post has noticed the brewing storm over the two-tier Internet; Doc Searls gets the long-term credit for starting the storm brewing. The WaPo piece, The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet, is clueless, at a trivial level in alleging that the debate is happening “on obscure blogs”, but most of all in the outrageous claim that “Companies like Google and Yahoo pay some fees to connect to their servers to the Internet, but AT&T will collect little if any additional revenue when Yahoo starts offering new features that take up lots of bandwidth on the Internet. When Yahoo’s millions of customers download huge blocks of video or play complex video games, AT&T ends up carrying that increased digital traffic without additional financial compensation.” While the details of the deals by which the big boys buy bandwidth are closely-guarded secrets, the notion that any of them can dramatically increase their net traffic without paying for it, that notion is just wacko. I’ve sent Christopher Stern, the author, an email, but this silliness is already on the streets of Washington in a few hundred thousand dead-tree instances. The difference between blogs and the mainstream media is that when we screw up, we can mostly repair the damage. [Update: Five days later. No answer to my polite, friendly email. No change in the article. So this “journalism” thing... it’s a profession where you can just make random shit up and print it whether it’s right or wrong, and ignore feedback, and you just don’t do those “retraction” or “update” or “apology” things? Seems like a flawed, short-lived business model to me.]