Tim Lee

For Shame!

Matt Stoller thinks my New York Times op-ed is “just disgraceful.” Why?

Timothy B. Lee comes from the ‘Show-Me Institute’, a fake think tank that defends the teaching of Intelligent Design and is funded by corporate interests and foundations with a right-wing ideological slant. As a 501(c)3, they don’t have to release their donor list, but you can get a sense of who they are from reading the bios on the Board of Directors page.

Ok, so the corporatists dug up a shill from an ideologically oriented corporate funded think tank, had this guy write an Op-Ed rehashing fake arguments about competitiveness and broadband, and weirdly enough, his name sound almost exactly like world-reknowned expert Tim Berners Lee, who takes the opposite position.

For the record, I’ve had the name “Timothy B. Lee” since before Mr. Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the vast right-wing conspiracy contacted my parents in anticipation of the network neutrality debate and convinced them to name me Timothy B. Lee.


Also, for the record, I think the theory of intelligent design is nonsense, but I’m not so arrogant as to believe I’m entitled to dictate to other parents what they teach their children. And my co-author Will isn’t exactly an ID apologist either.

As for working for a fake think tank, I can only assure Mr. Stoller that my employer does, in fact, exist. He’s more than welcome to come to St. Louis and see it for himself any time he likes. And I wasn’t aware that being a libertarian disqualified one from participating in policy debates.

Of course, Mr. Stoller was so busy calling me names that he never got around to explaining what’s fake about my argument.

Update: I should also mention that the label “corporate funded” is inaccurate. Like most think tanks, we do raise money from corporations, but to date, less than 10 percent of our budget has come from corporate sources. Most of our money comes from individuals in Missouri, such as those on our board of directors, who like our perspective on the issues.

Update 2: Oops, I forgot to include a link to Stoller’s post. Apologies!

Update 3: This is fun! In addition to being a corporate shill at a fake think tank making fake arguments, Mr. Stoller felt compelled to update his post with the important news that my picture is “pretty hilarious.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of devastating criticism!

Update 4: At the request of Mr. Berners-Lee’s publicist, I’ve contacted the New York Times and asked them to add a clarification indicating that I’m a different Timothy B. Lee. And to respond directly to Seth’s insinuations: it didn’t occur to me that this would be a problem, and if it had, I would have mentioned to the Times that they might want to add a clarification.

August 3, 2006 | Comments |

Viewing 52 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    While the "think tank" may indeed exists, the claim that it is non-partisan is hogwash. Of course so is your, "please don't throw me in that briar patch" argument.

    Why aren't the telcos lobbying congress for regulation? How about airlines? The easiest way to screw the consumer and make the stockholders money, by your argument, is to get a regulatory regime imposed on the industry. Why are they failing in their fiduciary duty to the stockholders?
    • ^
    • v
    As Matt Stoller said:

    "This is just disgraceful. A guy named Timothy B. Lee published an Op-Ed on net neutrality reiterating the telecom positioning, and claiming that the market for broadband services is competitive. It is not. Timothy B. Lee sounds an awful lot like Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and strong net neutrality proponent."

    Dirty politics, Tim. Libertarians are supposed to be against fraud.
    • ^
    • v
    Seth,

    I'm not sure what your point is. Am I supposed to change my name? Not write about any Internet-related subjects?
    • ^
    • v
    The other TBL would be tech literate enough to link to the article he's arguing about. Thanks for fixing it, Seth.

    Should we really take advice about technology from someone who doesn't understand a href ?
    • ^
    • v
    The telcos lobby for particular FCC regulations all the time, which they make excellent use of to shield themselves from competition. The FCC dispute resolution process greatly favors the incumbents by allowing them to delay while their challengers run out of money.

    BTW, Tim, it's disappointing that you didn't link to Stoller's piece--I found the thread through the link in Seth Finkelstein's comment.

    Seth, what fraud are you accusing Tim of?
    • ^
    • v
    Mike,

    Why is our claim to non-partisanship hogwash?

    My claim isn't necessarily that regulations will benefit telecom companies overall. Rather, my claim is that political processes are negative-sum games, because they encourage rent-seeking in the form of hiring lawyers and lobbyists and because they restrict the pace of innovation by making more decisions subject to bureaucratic oversight. So my guess is that the regulatory process will hurt both the telcos and consumers, but that most of the harm will fall on consumers, who don't have effective representation in Washington.

    Like I said in the op-ed, it's not like this hasn't happened before. The ICC was never an effective check on the monopoly power of railroads, but after about 1920, it did provide the railroads with protection against competition. You can see the same story in the airline industry, the cable industry, the telephone industry, the electricity industry, and many other regulatory processes. Why would network neutrality regulations be any different?
    • ^
    • v
    Tim, all this time you've been a corporate shill and you never even let me know. At least you could have bought me some stuff off my Amazon wish list. Cheap bastard!
    • ^
    • v
    C'MON GUYS! That's one of the oldest dirty tricks in the political playbook. If you don't know what's going on, then my name is Jesse L. Jackson.
    • ^
    • v
    What a disappointing hatchet job by Stoller. I've read some of his stuff on mydd.com in the past and I've been impressed that he understands somewhat that the increased worship of "IP" by our legal system is likely to do serious harm to the Internet and to the nation. I've harbored wishful thoughts that lefties like Stoller and righties like Tim could work together on issues of IP reform, much like Zoe Lofgren offered to try and find common ground with the Cato folks a few months back. I guess no such luck.
    • ^
    • v
    FWIW, I often don't agree with your stance Tim, but I always enjoy reading your posts. They are intelligent, thoughtful, and honest. It's too bad Stoller hasn't read any of your DMCA stuff . . . hardly doctrinaire corporate shill stuff. Anyway, keep up the great stuff.
    • ^
    • v
    FWIW, I often don't agree with your stance Tim, but I always enjoy reading your posts. They are intelligent, thoughtful, and honest. It's too bad Stoller hasn't read any of your DMCA stuff . . . hardly doctrinaire corporate shill stuff. Anyway, keep up the great stuff.
    • ^
    • v

    Re mike:My guess is that the Times picks the bio tagline for the columns it runs. I've written a column or two for my local paper and they don't allow me to supply titles or bios. The Show Me institute is non-partisan (I'm guessing) in the sense that it isn't a PAC or explicit subsidiary of the Republican party or a particular corporation. Obviously anybody whose self description includes


    The work of the Institute is rooted in the American tradition of free markets and individual liberty. The Institute's scholars seek to move beyond the 20th-century mindset that every problem has a government solution. Instead, they develop policies that respect the rights of the individual, encourage creativity and hard work, and nurture independence and social cooperation.


    is going to be reliably more congenial to some partisan points of view than others. You do errect a nice straw man though: I haven't seen Tim assert that "The easiest way to screw the consumer and make the stockholders money ... is to get a regulatory regime imposed on the industry". I have seen him assert that regulations imposed on industry, allegedly for consumer benefit, frequently end up being tools that serve the corporations they were meant to constrain. Perhaps you are asserting that regulatory capture does not exist?



    Oh, and Finkelstein makes the sort of ridiculous statement I would expect from the man who wrote Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Oh, wait, you're Seth, not Norman Finkelstein. Why don't you make that clear when you post? Fraud...



    (For those of you not getting the humour: it isn't Tim Berners Lee, it is actually Tim Berners-Lee. Sir Tim has a hyphenated last name, so they actually have different last names! A clear case of fraud indeed...)

    • ^
    • v
    I didn't know who Matt Stoller was but went and looked at his site http://mattstoller.com/ .


    My experience is that people who are deeply involved in partisan politics have difficulty seeing things through anything other than a partisan lens. I would guess that's part of the reason for his assumption that you and your organization are partisan, Tim. I know you to be ideological, as am I, but not partisan.


    It might be exhilarating to get such harsh criticism, but I don't see that it's particularly imporant. This is giving undue "air"-time to a person who isn't putting forward a serious, careful argument. Most importantly, this all may be a waste of TLF readers' extremely valuable eyeball-time.

    • ^
    • v
    Doug: I think Mr. Stoller is an outlier here. I had cordial discussions with Democratic Hill staffers about the DMCA back in March, as well as a very friendly meeting with the good folks at Public Knowledge, with whom I agree on the vast majority of the other issues they work on.

    I think the grown-ups on the left are willing to work together on issues of common agreement while respectfully disagreeing on other issues. Unfortunately, for others (on the left and the right) partisan rancor seems to trump all other considerations. I'm particularly disappointed at Seth's hostility, given that we agree on a lot of other technology issues.

    Also, I have to disagree with your characterization of me as a "righty." While I certainly have some "righty" opinions, you'll see on my other blog that I have a considerable number of "lefty" opinions as well.
    • ^
    • v
    Tim, *maybe* I'm being too hard on you personally. To spell it out: It is an old and longstanding sleazy campaign tactic to find someone with a similar name to a real candidate, and put them on the ballot to cause confusion. These people then say things like "Oh, my name is Georgie Bush? What a coincidence! Well, it is my real name. Surely you don't expect me to avoid politics ...".

    Someone along the line did that with you, and that's the reason there's an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Net Neutrality today "By TIMOTHY B. LEE".

    At best, taking you at your word, you were used.

    Note I'm not involved in Net Neutrality, I've stayed far away from it, for my own reasons. It just annoyed me to see Berners-Lee being sandbagged like that.
    • ^
    • v
    Seth, would you care to clarify as to who "put me up to" being interested in this topic? I wrote about this topic because I'm interested in it. You might have noticed that I write extensively about a wide variety of technology-related subjects--including a number of issues on which we agree. Are you seriously suggesting that someone tricked me into being interested in tech policy so they could confuse the public about Tim B-L's position on network neutrality?
    • ^
    • v
    How idiotic is the suggestion that Timothy B. Lee is part of an attempt to confuse readers into thinking that he is Tim Berners-Lee? Let us count the ways.

    (1) Google it! By my count, 42 of the first 50 results refer to *this* Timothy B. Lee, not Tim Berners-Lee. Guess what? None of the other eight refers to Berners-Lee either.

    (2) Anyone who knows enough to know who Tim Berners-Lee is knows he doesn't work for the Show-Me Institute.

    (3) Tim Berners-Lee's name isn't -- and *couldn't* be -- abbreviated as Timothy B. Lee. Berners is not his middle name. Berners-Lee is a hyphenated last name. His middle name is John (per Wikipedia entry above). So the closest you could get is Tim J. Berners-Lee. How confusing!

    (4) *This* Tim Lee isn't a knight!

    I'll predict right now that the Times won't run any kind of clarification because absolutely none is necessary. His actual name and affiliation were enough to identify him accurately.

    Speaking of Tim's picture, he does appear to have white skin ... just like Tim Berners-Lee. What's he trying to pull? Oh, Timmy, where will the deception end?!
    • ^
    • v
    I'm suggesting that somewhere along the path to the piece's appearance on the New York Times Op-Ed page, whatever politics is involved got a dose of sleaze. You're very naive if you don't see there's at least the appearance of bad dealings, especially given the contentiousness of the Net Neutrality debate.
    • ^
    • v
    Seth, your statement is based on a complete lack of familiarity with the actual working process of journalism, let alone the New York Times editorial page. Would it make a difference to know that Tim's been published by the NYT page before on the unrelated issue of piggybacking on wireless network connections? Of course not. I won't bother you with the facts, you've got your mind made up.
    • ^
    • v
    Some relevant facts:

    * Tim's previous NYT editorial, which rebuts the claims that this editorial's running is part of some kind of ruse.

    * Google results for "Timothy B. Lee" -- 9 of the first 10 refer to the writer of today's NYT editorial. The other refers to a different Timothy B. Lee altogether.

    * Tim Berners-Lee's name could not correctly be abbreviated as Timothy B. Lee. Berners is not his middle name, it's part of a hyphenated last name. His middle name is John.

    * Timothy B. Lee hasn't been knighted! (Yet?)

    * Tim's picture is goofy looking. But so what?
    • ^
    • v

    Mike,


    And if you were technically literate enough, you would have known the escape characters to put the < and > symbols around the snarky comment you made...

    • ^
    • v
    I repeat: If someone can't at least see why this has an appearance of impropriety, that is deeply problematic. Which is one reason I'm less charitable. The silliness is very grating. It's one thing to maintain there was no fraudulent intent involved. It's quite another to be shocked, shocked, that someone would ever suggest such a thing could happen in this fine establishment.
    • ^
    • v
    Regardless of intention, Mike and Kevin, people are misattributing Mr. Lee's article to Tim Berners-Lee. I am the W3C spokesperson, and handle all of Tim's press work. Believe me, there is confusion out there about who wrote the article.

    The problem is further complicated by the fact that Tim's previous comments in NYT on the topic are only available to paid subscribers, and the majority of readers of the OpEd pages don't spend time looking for TimBL's latest blog posts.

    I'm grateful to Mr. Lee for writing to the NYT to ask for a clarification on his identity v. TimBL, though it probably won't be enough for paper readers.

    There are some people who don't agree with TimBL's position who have no problem with that confusion. I'm glad Tim Lee isn't one of them.
    • ^
    • v
    I tried posting twice with links to explain why no reasonable person (which obviously excludes Matt Stoller) would mistake Timothy B. Lee for Tim Berners-Lee, but they need to be approved by a human editor -- probably because with all the links they look too much like spam. So here we go again.

    Some relevant facts:

    (1) Even Matt Stoller wasn't confused. His post wasn't about expressing shock that Tim Berners-Lee was reversing his previous position on Net neutrality. In fact, he did the little work it takes to Google "Timothy B. Lee" (9 out of the first 10 results) to ID who he is.

    (2) Tim Berners-Lee doesn't go by Timothy B. Lee. It would be profoundly odd if he did so, considering that his middle name is John, not Berners. Berners-Lee is a hyphenated last name. Timothy J. Berners-Lee is the closest we could get. No reasonable reader would confuse the two.

    (3) Timothy B. Lee isn't a knight.

    (4) Anyone who knows enough to care about Tim Berners-Lee's opinion knows he doesn't work at the Show-Me Institute.

    (5) Nothing in Timoth