Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the U2-to-you-too dept

The biggest story this week was, of course, the big push to get the public’s voice heard on the issue of net neutrality — so it’s fitting that our number one comment on the insightful side comes in response to big broadband’s ongoing misrepresentation of its service (and its pleas to the FCC not to expose its lies). The observation, from Whoever, is simple: why so much focus on speed alone?

What about total monthly allowance?

The speed is largely irrelevant if you have a small data cap, as is imposed by wireless carriers. The FCC should require a data cap to be at least 100GB for a service to qualify as broadband.

For the second place comment, we’ve got another simple observation, this time from an anonymous commenter who rightly thought something sounds odd about a dietary supplement company that sells everything at a discount:

They give ALL of their customers a “discount”?

That’s not called a discount. That’s called a price.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with one more thought on net neutrality, the FCC, and broadband speeds. Breech tidily dismantled the claim that people don’t actually want better broadband:

I always love how isps try to use the argument “but we have higher speeds and no one is buying them” argument. Maybe because you charge way too much for that crap? If I am the sole provider of food to the country, and I give away bread and water for free, but meat costs $1000/pound, do I get to claim that people don’t really want meat?

Next, we’ve got the first of several comments this week responding to U2’s innovative but slightly confusing “make our album appear on your phone for free” promotion. One commenter on that post claimed that we insist artists offer their work for free, but jupiterkansas showed up to set the record straight:

Techdirt doesn’t insist that an artist offer their music for free. It’s always up to the artist (although more likely the publisher which owns the copyright) to choose how they offer their work.

What Techdirt says is that the music will be available for free whether the artist likes it or not, either through file sharing, public libraries, or trading with friends, and the artist must consider how they deal with that. The response initially was to just make it more and more illegal and futilely trying to make it go away, jeopardizing the open nature of the internet in the process. That’s what Techdirt is against.

U2 has decided to find someone besides the fans to foot the bill, which is exactly the kind of business model exploration that Techdirt encourages. They’ve turned to a corporate benefactor the way classical composers once turned to royalty.

Now it’s a question of whether Apple spent their money wisely and can this work for other artists in the future.

We also had a true marketing disaster this week, with Microsoft paying the NFL to use Surface tablets, only to hear them referred to as “iPad-like tools”. This inspired Roger Strong to deliver our funniest comment of the week:

Or as those outside of North America would call it, “an iPad-like tool for a football-like sport.”

Second place for funny comes in response to our old friend Shiva Ayyadurai — or rather, in response to the mainstream media outlets swallowing his story whole. Michael deployed the internet’s new nuclear option:

Can someone from the EU please send the internet a notice to forget this guy?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got two more comments on the U2 situation. First up is Chris ODonnell with a simple question, or perhaps a zen koan:

If taking music without paying is piracy, and receiving music without asking is spam, does that mean the the opposite of piracy is spam?

Next, we’ve got nasch, replying to another commenter who wondered if the album in question was any good:

It can’t be, it’s free. /Bono logic

That’s all for this week, folks!