The Wall Street Journal Sucks at the Internet

So the other day I saw a copy of the Wall Street Journal splayed out on an empty table, with the editorial page facing up.  The piece entitled “Free the Web–From the FCC!” caught my eye as being a particularly obnoxious use of an exclamation point, as well as clearly being some inane, poorly informed commentary on the Comcast network management ruling.

Surprise, surpise–the author, one L. Gordon Crovitz, makes use of a poor analogy (the internet as railway) and attacks a strawman version of the net neutrality argument, relying heavily on the notion that web users contradict themselves when they encourage any form of regulation.  I don’t want to be tricked into singing the praises of the FCC–god knows I’m not prepared to do any such thing–but in an ologopolistic industry with unbelievably high costs of entry like telecom, the last thing any reasonable person would want to do is put all the power in the hands of the ISPs.  That’s how we end up in situations like this.

I could spend all day raising a fuss about every detail of the article, but I don’t have the time and, quite frankly, I don’t respect the Wall Street Journal enough to privilege it with a careful deconstruction of any of its editorials.  I do want to take a second to point out the second idiotic, internet-focused op-ed of the week for the WSJ: “The Internet is Ruining America’s Movies and Music.“  If I have some time in between finishing all the various things for this blog that I should have already finished by now, I may deal a little bit more with the second one.