Bono’s ditty in the New York Times has raised some heckles because of his seemingly absurd stance on the need for ISPs to police copyright. It makes one wonder how he can at once argue that:

Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

and then…

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

So it is ignoble to control people’s use of and access to information in order to control dissent, but fine so long as it secures corporate profits.

Note to self: When arguing for more corporate control over the flow of information on the internet, ensure to mention child pornography and poor singer-songwriters on the cafe circuit.

Mark Bernstein argues that it is more useful to think of newspapers as coming undone. Large piles of paper tied with a string that the internet have slowly, and now quickly unraveled.

Mark Bernstein: The Bundle of Newspapers Comes Undone

The reason is that newspapers are a bundle, tied together with string. The link and the Web have been yanking on that string for twenty years now. When you do that at first, nothing much happens, especially if the bundle is big and heavy. But, if the knot comes undone, very suddenly papers are flying all about and you no longer have a bundle at all.