Concurring Opinions, via Instapundit, writes in favor of Net Neutrality — a key issue, and one that affects the ability of everyone in the world to get his thoughts on the Internet, as well as for everyone else to read them. But, of course, someone has to pay for everything. Some of the ones paying are inclined not to provide quite so much free-riding on the system as is available to you and me right now. As Frank Pasquale notes, considering Lawrence Tribe’s recent pronouncements on the subject:

Many First Amendment absolutists [such as Tribe] would like to see it eviscerate the public’s rights to privacy and cultural self-determination.

Now, I get the point: Tribe says, if the First Amendment says that, say, a parade organizer has the right to decide who marches in his parade, why doesn’t a broadband owner have a right to govern which electrons march in his? The analogy is pretty lame; if a parade is indeed protected speech, a copper wire certainly isn’t. (In other words it has no message of its own; it is only a medium.) But that sentence was troubling. I wrote in the comments:

Notwithstanding the characterization (“eviscerate”), this sentence names three competing “rights”: Free speech, privacy and cultural self-determination. For 20 points, how many of those rights are in the Constitution?

I count one. Now, I love Net Neutrality. And I am not an expert on the competing constitutional interests at stake — which, let’s face it, are already far-fetched analogies to anything the framers of the Constitution could ever have contemplated regarding free speech. But we’ll have to do a lot better preserving it than positing either a right to privacy, itself only the product of those famous emanations, or “cultural self-determination,” as worthy of offsetting what may or may not be legitimate First Amendment rights.

UPDATE:    A lot of this going around.

Concurring Opinions rounds up law firms’ (servers’) edits. This, I like! But it’s mostly inside baseball. (Via IP.)

UPDATE: So is Wikipedia just worthless? Or is this just a transparent version of what happens, in one form or other, in every publication?

Here’s a hint: You use it.

MORE:  On the other hand, this complicates things.

Have I mentioned how against it, in its absolute form I am? It has its uses, yes; but defamation should not be one of them. Well, here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of: While libel and trade disparagement lawsuits lie gasping for air, how could I have forgotten the omnipotent powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission?

The chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. apologized to shareholders on Tuesday for anonymously posting comments about his company on the Internet as the organic and natural foods grocer said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had launched a probe into the matter.

News of the SEC probe comes a week after court documents filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission revealed that Whole Foods Chief Executive John Mackey posted messages on a Yahoo! chat forum under an alias for years.

In the postings, Mackey talked up his company while predicting a bleak future for Wild Oats Markets Inc., the rival his firm is trying to acquire.

Maybe if the rest of us were publicly-traded issues, the law would protect us from web-based scoundrelry, too.