Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Thank you for posting this link, it's one of the funniest and most incoherent rants I've ever read. Sulzberger shrieks about the "fundamental error" of the "duopoly" and misses the fact that the net neutrality movement is based on a misconstruction of something Ed Whiteacre said about IPTV once upon a time. The Telcos are spending billions nationwide upgrading residential broadband networks, and they intend to pay for the upgrade with money they make from IPTV, a delivery vehicle for television programming. They're doing this because Americans are willing to pay more for TV than for Internet subscriber service. So the crack about "Google can't use my pipes for free", properly understood, was about the IPTV pipe, not the Internet pipe.

So it's clearly the case that Sulzberger is one with an understanding deficit, not the Telcos. The Internet is a fine thing, but it's not the only game in town, and at this rate, it never will be.

It's so bad I wondered if Verizon and AT&T are paying Mr Sulzberger to deliver this drivel.

It's got to be a put-up job, right?

Sulzberger's for real. There was a debate over Net Neutrality in New York a few months back, featuring Tim Karr of George Soros' "Free Press" organization, and George Ou of ZDnet. Sulzberger was in the audience and became so animated he was cautioned to behave himself on pain of forceable removal from the premises. He takes his open source/free stuff/romantic Internet illusions very seriously.

AT&T can't buy this kind of a public relations godsend anywhere.