Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the innovation-nation(alization) dept

This week, Verizon got rather snarky about its dispute with Level 3 over traffic congestion and slow Netflix speeds — and, in doing so, essentially admitted that the problem was its fault. Both of our top-voted comments for Insightful this week came in response to that post, and first up is Scote, with an apt analogy:

This is like a company demanding UPS shove all the packages it ordered for it’s company headquarters be delivered through a 6″ mail slot and then blaming UPS for the congestion.

It’s Verizon’s customers who ordered the data, data Verizon promised to deliver them at high speed. Netflix sends it straight to Verizon at locations near where the data was requested, all paid by Neflix and delivered via via Level 3, and instead of saying “thanks for getting that to us” Verizon is saying “how dare you! You should pay us!” This is just all sorts of effed up.

In second place we’ve got Noah Callaway with a noteworthy observation:

It is telling that the Level3 blog post has 192 comments, and Verizon’s blog doesn’t allow for comments.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with the story about a musician attempting to sue for defamation over reports on his history of poor crowdfunding efforts. One anonymous commenter noticed a problem with his threats:

“ive been building a case with my lawyer for 3 years now.” Sounds like a bluff. The statute of limitations for defamation in California is one year. CCP 340(c).

Next we’ve got another anonymous commenter who had the intriguing idea to co-opt the language of copyright maximalists to fight back against government surveillance:

Since everyone is misusing the word “theft” and “steal”, tell the government to stop stealing my metadata.

On that note, we head over to the funny side. This week we saw a ridiculous proposal to nationalize big internet companies to prevent abuse, which would itself have been pretty funny if it had been a joke. Dale won first place for funny by quickly laying the idea to waste:

Well – if ‘nationalizing’ is the cure for ‘abuse behaviour’…

..then let’s ‘nationalize’ the NSA!

Oh, wait….

Of course, this week has some competition for “stupidest idea”, since it’s also the week federal prosecutor Sally Quillian Yates made the claim that “Copyright infringement discourages smart people from doing innovative things”. Michael took second place for funny with his simple response to that assertion:

Well Yates, you have certainly dodged a bullet then.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more response to Yates’ comments, this time from the devil himself:

As a smart person, I’m often called upon to do innovative things. One of my highest achievements was to convince otherwise intelligent people that nebulous ideas could be stuffed into a bag and stolen like so many doughnuts.

– Lucifer

And finally, we’ve got an anonymous response to the highly-questionable claim that Comcast is the “number 1 rated” broadband provider:

Just like how chlamydia is the number 1 rated STD!

That’s all for this week, folks!