Craig Newmark comes clean on the wild tale of Cox blocking today, admitting it was a bug and not a feature:
The whole thing was exacerbated by folks talking about ‘net neutrality…The message from some is that blocking sites is something that big telecoms might do and in all the confusion, that message turned into an incorrect message that an ISP actually did. To repeat, none of this was deliberate. However, it does illustrate a downside of journalism via blogs; stuff is published, then maybe fact-checked.
It sounds like he’s suggesting in a round-about way that he was, like, brainwashed by Matt Stoller and Save the Internet, doesn’t it? Damn that must be painful.
Give Craig a candy, he’s trying to do the right thing.
Craig is not a liar, and he didn’t issue a retraction.
My review of Authentium’s treatment of the blocking issue showed an excellent and timely technical response, a very good customer support response to users, and only a so-so communication response to Craig.
When our engineers see a problem they fix it and give the fix to our support people. We did all that in about a week back in March.
Unfortunately Craig did not get the email he deserved, which left him and his company in the dark until the blogosphere got involved in June.
And the rest is history.
Somehow the story got from Craig’s List to the media, and I think that’s the interesting connection. The first media accounts accused you of “discrimination” and I still don’t know who planted that idea. So we’ll have to wait and see whether Craig was the liar who did that or someone else did.
It is clear is that Matt Stoller and Tim Karr lied about this story.