43 comments

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  Luis

  1 year ago

  "It only makes us look foolish to pretend he’s Michael Moore with tenure."
  
  Don't say 'us' there, Tim. There are people who look foolish here, but you're not one of them.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Tim, really. When Milton Friedman made his critique of regulatory bodies he did it in words. When Lessig made his critique of capitalism, he did it in pictures. That's the point I was trying to make. Lessig puts on a thin veneer of scholarship, but his message is largely in the images and sounds that go into his presentations. When you confine your analysis of his presentation to the words he speaks, you sound like somebody who goes to a foreign film only to read the subtitles.
  
  Look at the audience reaction to Lessig at the FCC hearing. Is all that yelling, hallelujah, and shrieking praise consistent with the dispassionate analysis of public policy, or is a modern-day Nuremberg Rally?
  
  Every time you make this claim that Lessig has serious ideas with which you happen to slightly disagree, you help him with his brand.
  
  "Michael Moore with tenure" isn't a bad description, actually, but I'd say Lessig is the Michael Moore of Powerpoint.
  
  And this brings me to a point I wanted to make about Snydor's article. He would have done better to ignore the books and concentrate exclusively on the videos. There's a large collection of Lessig talks on YouTube, and it's only in these that the full power of his intellectually destructive demagoguery comes across.
  
  And BTW, if you're going to use your power as a contributor to this blog to bash commenters, it's only fair to allow commenters to reply with full blog posts. Many blog readers don't read comments, so my defense against this attack of yours will fall largely on deaf ears because it's below the horizon.
  
  @Luis: whatever point you're trying to make on Lessig's behalf has been made multiple times. Please be quiet, you annoy me.
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  My point is not on Lessig's behalf, Richard; it is actually mainly on Tim's. He's trying to argue a serious, scholarly point; you and Tom are using the techniques of demagogues to advance your political agendas. I'm just trying to point that out. I'm glad I'm irritating you; I merely regret that I haven't spent more time over the past eight years irritating those who are intellectually dishonest and willing to sacrifice their integrity for gains in power.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Here's the tiger image from Lessig's FCC testimony:
  
  http://bennett.com/blog/pitchers/smalltiger.jpg
  
  It really doesn't matter what he said after showing it, as the audience was so busy reacting to the image it probably didn't hear whatever excuses he offered for making such an obvious emotional appeal.
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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  He showed a picture of a bloodthirsty tiger, and the audience clapped partway through the passage I quoted above. Somehow I don't think that rises to the level of "intellectually destructive demagoguery." It's not nearly as bad as, for example, publishing a paper that consists largely of out-of-context quotes of an ideological opponent. Lessig is a compelling speaker. He's also a serious scholar. The former doesn't negate the latter.
  
  As far as my posts being more prominent than your comments, I think most of our readers are smart enough to click through to the comments page if they want to see what you have to say.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  My last comment, with a link to Lessig's tiger, is awaiting moderation.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  I see the comment has been approved now.
  
  Tim, if readers are smart enough to click through to the comments to read what I have to say, why didn't you put your criticism of my comment in a comment rather than in a post that didn't require any click-through? That's what we call an inconsistency in my trade.
  
  If Lessig is a serious scholar, please show me where he has advanced the discussion of any public policy issue by first-rate scholarship. And no, simply arguing that copyright terms should be shorter based on an emotional argument doesn't cut it. I want to see just one example of ground-breaking, serious scholarship, not just grist for the Powerpoint mill.
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  Tim Lee

  1 year ago

  I did it as a post rather than a comment because I thought some people who weren't following the previous discussion might find my point interesting. And anyway, life isn't fair. You're welcome to have any policy you like for responding to commenters on your blog.
  
  And I consider most of Lessig's long-form writing to be serious scholarship, although not always scholarship I agreed with. I'm not going to waste time arguing specifics because I'm sure we have differing views on what makes scholarship "first rate."
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Just find a single serious law review article, and then we can see if it makes any novel arguments. I submit that the popular press - source of such things as "Code" and "Future of Ideas" isn't the typical venue for scholarship, nor is the Powerpoint deck.
  
  So far, the argument that Lessig is more demagogue than scholar stands unrefuted.
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  Just find a single serious law review article, and then we can see if it makes any novel arguments.
  
  Leaving aside the gross assumption that there are no novel arguments in Lessig's popular works (Code in particular is one of those books that is so novel that everyone takes it for granted now), finding his serious law review articles is pretty easy. If you were actually serious about it (you're not, but I'll play along) you might start at... I dunno, maybe his list of published articles? Or perhaps the Stanford publication search tool, which lists 70 journal articles published before 2000 (the date of his first book)?
  
  There you'd find such significant articles as Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace and The Law Of The Horse, which are only two of the most frequently cited papers in recent legal literature. (I'm told his purely Constitutional work is also excellent, but I haven't read any of it.)
  
  I'll certainly grant that you have to start at the bottom of his own page, with the older stuff, but it was on the strength of that work, and not his books, that he was granted tenure at Harvard and Stanford, two institutions which may well tenure demagogues, but only if they are also serious scholars.
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  Don Marti

  1 year ago

  When did trying to reach a non-specialist audience make someone a "demagogue"? Was Carl Sagan a "demagogue" when he chose to use TV?
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  TLM

  1 year ago

  This guy's a total performer, and a shill. He's not to be taken seriously. He's an "academic" for the YouTube age -- short sound bytes for those of us with a 30 second Internet video clip attention span. His whole career has been about failure -- he lost the Eldred case, he was thrown off the Microsoft anti-trust legal team, so he decided to attach his star to Google and teach this nonsensical p.r. type of legal "theory" on copyright. Who does it benefit, why his corporate patron Google of course!
  
  If they can successfully "dumb down" intellectual property protections to a sufficient degree (with Lessig's help) they can hoover up movies, books, news, music any content they want and then advertise around it to make gazillions while the copyright owners get nothing. That's what this is about.
  
  Oh and by the way, despite his protestations that he really cares about copyright, he slipped up I guess talking to a bunch of hackers in Germany. Here he is at the 23c3 hacker conference drinking a beer at the podium no less and opining on what he REALLY thinks about copyright (sorry in advance for the language, but its his quote and it give him up for the fraud that he is):
  
  "...If I thought that there were a simple way to say fuck you to copyright and we’re going forward with free culture, um or at least the particular version of copyright because again I’m an old communist, I believe in copyright, but if it thought there was an effective way to do that then I would be much more encouraged by that type of strategy."
  
  Watch it for yourself: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=lessig+23...
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  Michael Masnick

  1 year ago

  I'm noticing a pattern. Those attacking Lessig are doing so by calling him names or quoting him out of context.
  
  No one hitting back against him seems willing to offer anything that actually responds to the substance of his arguments.
  
  Funny, that...
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  The point, Mike Masnick, is that Lessig himself has made a career out of calling names and quoting people out of context, not of making serious arguments. So why treat him differently than the way he treats others?
  
  One good example of Lessig's penchant for inaccurate quotation was cited on this blog recently vis a vis Lessig's dishonest use of a partial quotation from Gerald Faulhaber at Lessig's first End-to-End conference. Did you read that?
  
  The main problem I have with Lessig from a policy perspective is his attempt to increase the FCC's powers to regulate details of Internet service plans under the guise of end-to-end, BTW.
  
  In the domain of network engineering, end-to-end is a model of network operation that simply refrains from performing error correction at the network layer of a multi-hop packet network.
  
  The practice is either useful or not depending on the time requirements of the application, and has no policy implications at all. But Lessig has built an empire on a twisted application of it. Only a dishonest man would attempt to do that.
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  Timon

  1 year ago

  TLM,
  
  Actually he did win an important case (Hardwicke) against the school where he was repeatedly raped as a child.
  
  Also, several people here seem to have trouble with the idea that Lessig could both argue the position of Milton Friedman in courts, in briefs and in scholarly work, and also make videos explaining these positions to people who might not read those kinds of works. (I get the feeling the latter category includes many of his adversaries.)
  
  And Richard,
  
  He didn't make his career out of calling people names: he made it by clerking for notorious communists Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, and by arguing originalism and orthodox economics to the Supreme Court in Eldred.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Lessig had a major change of mind about libertarianism during his stay at the Berkman Center, Timon. Pre-Berkman, he was on track toward a respectable, if humble, career as an originalist, but post-Berkman he's been trying to play the part of the rock-star intellectual who's saving the Internet from the capitalists. It's night and day.
  
  And his arguments in Eldred were simply disingenuous manipulations, which is why the court threw him out on his ear, including Scalia.
  
  And yes, I know Lessig was molested as a child, and suspect the experience has something to do with his present emotional state, but it's not relevant to subjects under discussion unless you're seeking a sympathy vote. He has more than enough money to get therapy.
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  Timon

  1 year ago

  There were two issues related to Hardwicke that were brought up by others: 1) his win-loss record, and 2) his honesty.
  
  That is a charming pop-psychological diagnosis, BTW, and a great illustration of how much more serious you are than Lessig.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  I didn't offer any diagnosis, Timon, I said the emotional trauma is not relevant. But perhaps you've got something anyway: the only case Lessig has ever one was one in which he had a personal stake. So rather than showing off for the court with arguments too clever by half, he made an honest and earnest attempt to win by engaging in some serious, non-demagogic lawyering.
  
  But if that's the case, it's something that's only happened once in Lessig's career, and is therefore an outlier.
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  TLM

  1 year ago

  Timon: Lessig and his acolytes always fall back on the "but he clerked for Scalia and Posner" as if that somehow burnishes his street cred as a deep libertarian free market thinker (it doesn't, he's not, and that was a long time ago before his -- ahem - "transformation").
  
  But it definitely serves his interests to try and sell this canard. That way he's sort of the Internet "everyman" attractive to both leftists and libertarians -- the "strange bedfellows" phenomenon that the media always finds so newsworthy.
  
  Without the Scalia/Posner connection (and a smattering of lets be charitable and say well-intentioned but misguided free marketeers) all he's left with is a very shrill constituency with some, shall we say interesting viewpoints:
  
  Free Press' Robert McChesney he of the "The United States is, I think, by any honest account, the leading 'terrorist' institution in the world today..." Lessig's on the Free Press board.
  
  Cory Doctorow he of the "I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes." Doctorow was one of the first Creative Commons/Lessig proteges.
  
  This isn't stuff that's taken out of context. Look at his followers. It's the Matt Stoller's the MoveOn.org's the Gigi Sohn's the San Francisco based "street theater" EFF loonies.
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  He didn’t make his career out of calling people names: he made it by clerking for notorious communists Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia, and by arguing originalism and orthodox economics to the Supreme Court in Eldred.
  
  And by being one of the most-cited legal scholars in the country over the past seven years (that would be the period after he left Berkman and became a "street theater loony.")
  
  (I look forward to the creative way in which that is dismissed as well, as it inevitably will be.)
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  Timon

  1 year ago

  "He’s sort of the Internet “everyman” attractive to both leftists and libertarians." Couldn't have put it better myself!
  
  And Richard, what a pity that George A. Akerlof, Kenneth J. Arrow, Timothy F. Bresnahan, James M. Buchanan, Ronald H. Coase, Linda R. Cohen, Milton Friedman, Jerry R. Green, Robert W. Hahn, Thomas W. Hazlett, C. Scott Hemphill, Robert E. Litan, Roger G. Noll, Richard Schmalensee, Steven Shavell, Hal R. Varian, and Richard J. Zeckhauser were snookered by Lessig's left-wing demagoguery. Probably because your comments were not visible on the front page of TLF, where everybody could read them!
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  That's easy, Luis: write a lot of popular books, you get cited a lot. Lessig didn't make the top 10 in any category, because he works them all. The man is certainly productive, I'll give him that. But it's also a commentary on the state of legal scholarship these days, where even blog posts are cited by the Supreme Court from time to time. For goodness sakes, I've been cited in legal briefs, and I'm not even a lawyer, let alone a leading one.
  
  And to ole Timon, it's not clear what you're saying: do you believe all those folks agree with Lessig, or simply that they've mentioned him? The ones I'm most familiar with would only have treated him as a pest that had to be swatted down so they could get on with their serious work. The man has certainly shaped the outlines of some of the great questions of the day, just not in a good way. Would there even be a discussion about net neutrality without Lessig's role as Pied Piper?
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  Timon

  1 year ago

  They filed amicus briefs in his support in Eldred, since they didn't have the benefit of your insights to guide them.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  And what did the Supremes have to say about Lessig's arguments in that case? I can remind you if you've forgotten.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Here we go, the court's opinion that Timon doesn't want you to see: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/01...
  
  It was a 7-2 opinion, with Stevens and Breyer dissenting on technical grounds. Not even close, as they say in baseball.
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  Timon

  1 year ago

  I believe the court said that the law was stupid and economically counter-productive, but not unconstitutional. You'll have a hell of a time finding any economist who disagrees with the first part of that formulation, and as to the latter Breyer put it well (by his lowish standard): "The majority believes these conclusions rest upon practical judgments that at most suggest the statute is unwise, not that it is unconstitutional. Legal distinctions, however, are often matters of degree. ... And in this case the failings of degree are so serious that they amount to failings of constitutional kind."
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  Richard: I expected a much more entertaining rebuttal to that point; I'm disappointed. But you can't seriously expect to get away with saying 'he's not a serious academic' and then ignoring the obvious, quantitatively measurable fact that academics think he's extremely important by... insulting academia. Take your pick; either academia matters (in which case calling him a failure as an academic is important, but measurably wrong) or academia doesn't matter since they'll cite anybody (in which case why are you spending so much time and energy asserting that he's a failed academic? Shouldn't he then be measured by his success as a popular author and publicizer of ideas instead?)
  
  I'm amused too by the dismissal of his writing as 'being all over the place', when, if you've actually read it, it is only in two areas (constitutional structure and IP/cyberlaw), and that most modern academics think excellence in multiple fields of study is a sign of a first-class mind.
  
  Also, I'm still waiting for the debunking of the quality of the actual articles, the ones he got tenure for, and the ones you claimed to be looking for, since, you know, I pointed them out.
  
  This is not to say that Lessig is not a publicity hound; he obviously is. But that is not mutually exclusive of being an excellent scholar (which he also obviously is), nor is it necessarily a bad thing to seek publicity when you're trying to get important ideas out to the public. Unless, of course, they are ideas you disagree with, apparently.
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  Seth Finkelstein

  1 year ago

  > "Would there even be a discussion about net neutrality without Lessig’s role as Pied Piper?"
  
  Oh, c'mon. This is getting into pure demonization territory. Yes, there would, because it's driven by a big fight between megamoney corporations - you know, that capitalism (in the real world) that Lessig supposedly committed a cardinal sin which is sufficient to cast him out in your eyes when he made the tiger comparison.
  
  Look at how absurd this is getting - he made a comparison which seems to be more or less correct, to the extent that one can see it at work in manipulation over Net Neutrality (granted, not quite the way he intended, but still more right than wrong). You denounce him him for the observation, which leaves you with the issue itself - and so then you denounce HIM as the cause of it too! This is finding a Great Satan to explain all the evils of the world (It's not the fault of God, I mean, capitalism, it's his evil twin the Devil, I mean, Lawrence Lessig).
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  And obviously he lost Eldred; we know that. I'm not seeing how that makes him a demagogue, or a failure as an academic, or a bad person. At most it makes him someone who you wouldn't want to have arguing your case at the Supreme Court, which puts him in good company with a long list of good people who've lost Supreme Court cases (often in part by taking them to the court before contemporary social norms caught up with them.)
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  I don't believe I've ever said Lessig is a "failed academic." He has tenure at Stanford, which would imply success by the relevant standard. What I have argued is that he's not practicing scholarship presently, having given himself over completely to Pied Piping. I even said that Pre-Berkman, he was on the road to a respectable career.
  
  And Seth, I don't mind people saying capitalism is the law of the jungle per se; it's not an inapt metaphor. I have a problem with people communicating that thought *in pictures* to concretize a metaphor in the weak minds of an audience organized and bussed-in by the astroturf Free Press organization for the sole purpose of salivating over such images and reacting to them in a lynch-mob-like manner.
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  Julian Sanchez

  1 year ago

  This is profoundly ridiculous. See also, for instance, "Fidelity in Translation," which should pop up if you Google it. To question, with a straight face, whether Lessig is widely recognized by his peers (whether they agree with him or not) as an important and influential legal scholar, apart from any of his popular work, is just to reveal that you don't know anything about contemporary legal scholarship. Seriously, stop digging.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  I don't know what you read, Julian, but I've seen a reference or two to a source in my reading that the author felt he had to deal with even though the task was unpleasant. Lessig was the first to try and draw policy implications from the end-to-end model of networking, for example. It's an idiotic thing to do, but in the infancy of cyberlaw nobody knew that so they had to deal with it. For example.
  
  Does that mean Lessig is respected and revered, or simply a pest who happened to stake out a claim to a certain range of issues before anyone else because of his basic charlatanism? One can't be a very good charlatan without the ability to fool lots of people, and that's a gift Lessig has in spades.
  
  The range of citations, in other words, doesn't refute the argument that Lessig is essentially a demagogue, if anything it shows that he's a very good one.
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  Julian Sanchez

  1 year ago

  Well, look, the Internet makes it easy for you to satisfy your curiosity. Pick a handful of eminent legal scholars at top law schools—especially ones who work in the areas were Lessig is frequently cited. Maybe Akhil Amar, Larry Tribe, Richard Epstein, hell, just go to the faculty directories at the top schools and choose some familiar names. Then send them an e-mail politely asking if they can reply, in a quick sentence or two, whether they think it's fair to say that Lessig is regarded as an important, original, and serious legal academic -- regardless of whether they personally agree with his views.
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  eee_eff

  1 year ago

  At the Stanford FCC hearing, he portrayed capitalism as a law of the jungle, in pictures of tigers eating prey. What intellectual critique if appropriate to refute that point of view, a picture of George Soros writing a fat check to Free Press so they can bus partisans to the hearing?
  
  Richard, taking the high road again, making an essentially populist appeal.
  
  In any case, Tim thanks for the refutation; I do really decry the loss of civility in public discourse, and think that it should be remarked upon more often. To use the word demagogue seems very unfair, and it is quite right you should take someone to task for using, essentially hate speech.
  
  http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2006/12/31/c...
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  TLM

  1 year ago

  Demagogue: A leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace. Sounds spot on to me.
  
  Lessig is form over substance. He has the patina of academic credibility only because he connects with the kiddos by delivering bite-sized chunks of populist, anti-corporate gibberish. He's the PERFECT "academic" for the YouTube generation because he's able to cleverly reduce serious public policy discussion to histrionic sound bites and silly one word Power Point slides that more often than not equate his opponents either as "big telecom", "big Hollywood", or "big media".
  
  "Big Internet" (e.g. Google) was right smart to latch on to him and throw him millions of dollars to carry their water. He understands their audience perfectly: YouTube vids of kids lighting their farts on fire, chick fights, Jesus getting smacked by a bus. This is Lessig's free "culture"... millions and millions of digital sharecroppers giving their IP away for free so the Google's of the world can cash in by advertising around it. It's brilliant.
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  Luis

  1 year ago

  Ah, yes, you're right. Clearly I (and most constitutional scholars) were suckered in by the 'bite size' 44 pages of dense academic prose of Reading the Constitution in Cyberspace, not to mention the 103 page histrionic sound bite that is Fidelity in Translation. I'll be more careful next time before I give someone the patina of academic credibility.
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  Seth Finkelstein

  1 year ago

  Richard: "I have a problem with people communicating that thought *in pictures* to concretize a metaphor ..."
  
  Would have have been similarly harsh on someone who illustrated "bandwidth hog" with a picture of an enormous literal pig pushing aside many smaller animals from food?
  
  I think you're also engaging "presentism", by not taking account how much silliness there was in net discussions at the time Lessig was writing his early material. Many other people were trying to draw policy implications from the Internet, usually utterly absurd (still waiting for cypherpunk cryptoanarchy ...).
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  Seth, Lessig didn't just characterize rapacious monopolists with his charming tiger pictures, he characterized all businesses that way. So it would be like characterizing all Internet users as hogs, and that would be unfair.
  
  While I can see simplifying the issues a bit for the pedestrian audience, the emotional manipulation is out of place at an FCC hearing, as well as opportunistic.
  
  Julian, the more relevant test of Lessig's status would be to check the heart rates of people who'd just attended one of his Nuremberg Rally performances. The appeal is emotional, not intellectual.
  
  Lessig appeals to lawyers by claiming to understand the Internet, which excites them into thinking they can too, just by reading his (rather awful) books on technology, so there's a symmetry here.
  
  So even if I were to concede your point that Lessig is an influential figure in legal circles (and not merely reviled as a charlatan by most of them,) the fact still remains that he passes off a defective analysis of technology to audiences by dressing up an essentially childish antipathy for authority in dumbed-down sound bites and emotional manipulation.
  
  The fear of authority obviously endears him to vulgar libertarians (i.e., teenagers who've just read Ayn Rand and don't want to clean their rooms when mom tells them to,) but its origins are as transparent as its limits.
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  Seth Finkelstein

  1 year ago

  Richard, I listened now to the part where Lessig shows the tiger slide. He says:
  
  "You don't talk about trusting a company, just like you don't talk about trusting a tiger, even though the brand management for tigers has very cute images that they try to sell you on, how beautiful and wonderful the tiger is."
  
  And should I go digging for an all-p2p-users-are-pirates statement from someone?
  
  I see this over and over again in discussions - Lessig makes a moderate statement, one not extreme, but does imply business and property have downsides. Libertarian or conservative critics go absolutely NUTS. "HE SAID ...!!!". They really want to fight straw-Lessig, the radical communist who wants to destroy capitalism and abolish private property.
  
  And there's no obligation to agree with everything real-Lessig says in order to think straw-Lessig is nonsense.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  View the image in context, Seth. Lessig had already said that firms constantly conspire to screw the public and avoid competition, etc. So the Lessig argument for E2E-based regulation, which he's still making today and isn't simply a historical artifact, goes like this: "We need to enact a strict E2E law, otherwise the capitalists will use their control of the Internet to screw the People. They'll stop all of our illegal downloads and put us on the dirt roads and eat us like tigers eat their prey. They can't help it, it's their nature."
  
  There are a rather large set of alternatives to E2E laws for the purposes of protecting the public from the firms, and there's significant reason to doubt an E2E law would protect anyone other than Google in any case.
  
  Lessig's call for an E2E law is extreme, and it's not a strawman.
  
  And BTW, how would one go about "proving" that any particular so-and-so is a demagogue? It can be done in this case, but I'd like to offer the right kind of proof.
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  Seth Finkelstein

  1 year ago

  Umm, Richard, how many people on the anti-NN side have been saying roughly:
  
  "ISP's need to enact strict traffic shaping, otherwise the P2P start-ups will screw the Internet. They’ll overrun ISP's with illegal downloads and put us on the dirt roads and eat us like tigers eat their prey. They can’t help it, it’s their nature."
  
  And arguably this whole thing started because Google and similar think that the teleco's will eat them alive like tigers - and they (Google/etc.) have the money to make a fuss over it.
  
  So I find it hard to see why Lessig gets such attack for saying basically what everyone else is saying (with certain parameters shifted, of course!).
  
  In fact, I don't think Lessig is wrong on the "nature" point - I think he's mis-focused about the prey. The People simply aren't worth it on that scale, like tigers don't go trying to eat ants.
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  Richard Bennett

  1 year ago

  I'm less concerned with that Lessig says that with the way he says it. If he were to present his case like a normal, rational, human being, it would be easier to examine what's right and what's wrong about it, but because he plays to the mob's basest sentiments, rational critique of the Lessig program is more or less impossible.
  
  Most of the NN critics I've read, and the ones I communicate with most frequently, argue their case based on facts and logic, not on emotion. And that's probably why we're losing.
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  Seth Finkelstein

  1 year ago

  Oh, come on. There's plenty of emotion on the anti-NN side. It is to laugh to argue otherwise. Maybe I should take this to email, as I don't want to say unpleasant things about people I view as justified in their emotions - but those emotions sure are there.
  
  The generic slogan of "regulating the Internet" is the purest play to mob mentality on the anti-NN side.
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