A reader sent me a link to the controversy last week over the blocking of Listpic by Craig’s List. Listpic was a service that allowed users to view Craig’s List ads as image thumbnails rather than as text ads:
In an e-mail to Wired News, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster explains the company’s position: “The 0.1% of our users who were accessing Craigslist images via Listpic were creating a grossly disproportionate drain on our server resources, degrading performance significantly for the 99.9% of our users accessing Craigslist in the normal fashion. Besides frequently hitting our site to harvest Craigslist user content for re-display on their site, each Listpic page load was causing our systems to serve up approx 100 full size images.”
In a forum post on Craigslist, company founder Craig Newmark (look for his yellow name tag) echoed Buckmaster’s comments. And of course there’s the inconvenient little fact that ListPic was serving Craigslist data on an external website while selling advertising — a big no-no.
The reader who emailed it to me suggested that this was an illustration of Craig Newmark’s hypocrisy for advocating network neutrality for telcos while discriminating against websites using Craig’s List content in ways they don’t approve of. I don’t think that’s quite right. I certainly think Craig’s support of Internet regulations is misguided, but I don’t think this really illustrates it. In the first place, network neutrality is a principle for ISPs to follow. No one has ever seriously suggested that it be applied to websites, and indeed, it’s not even clear what a neutrality policy for websites would even mean. Second, Listpic was not a Craig’s List customer, and so there’s no reason Craig’s List has any obligations at all to Listpic. Third, Craig appears to be claiming that Listpic wasn’t even serving up the images itself, but was hot-linking the images from Craig’s List’s servers—hot linking on such a large scale is universally regarded as a no-no.
There are good arguments against government regulation of the Internet, but spurious accusations of hypocrisy against Craig’s List, Google, or anybody else is not among them.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.