Please read the post with a heavy dose of sarcasm mixed with admiration :) I'd very much like to see formidable challengers arise.

And I actually wrote this post a week before Bezos bought the WaPo, although I think it only underscores the point.

Before you write anything again on Bozo or Amazon, please read http://stallman.org/amazon. If you have already read it, fine.

I just read through that link. What a nice list of naive points. Well, maybe I miss some context on the UK angle, i can make some comparisons with the german one.

The sweatshop warehouses, yeah. And you really think when you order a bokk by your local book store the people in the warehouse sending are treated any better? In this part of logistics, and I'm not at all proud of that, one of the easiest ways to cut costs (and everyone operating a warehouse will do that since logistics is regarded by most people as costs) is HR. The part of being ordered around by a computer, welcome to logistics in the 21st century. And that part is true for truck drivers, too. How are books delivered to your local book store again? If you think the boys and girls delivereing parcels for UPS and the like are treated any better, forget it. Most of them aren't even employed by these companies anymore, they are mere sub-contractors.

And at least were I live, the credit of killing local, independant book stores goes to big bookstore chains and not Amazon. Quite ironic that these chains are now trying to get a share of the eBook market using the same DRM techniques everybody is blaming Amazon for.

And this tax evading scheme. Hell I worked for big company that operated at the same site for more tha a decade before they payed ANY taxes there. The COO was quite sad they finally had to. Most european big corps are doing the very same thing with branches in, say, Delaware.

All that is not to say I consider all this to be good or even OK. It's just the way it is. Classical case of hate the game, not the player. But I don't think Benzos is troubled a lot by all this.

What makes his buying WaPo evil? Seriously. At all. Anything?

There's nothing particularly evil about Bezos buying the WP, but it's another step in my long-held belief that all of the major traditional news organs will be controlled by people who make their money elsewhere.

I think that's a better alternative than having traditional news organs being controlled by people who make their money from those news organs.

(I would argue the best alternative is ownership by individuals/organizations who have no financial stake whatsoever in journalism.)

Excellent point. There is another category of bad owners too, state owned. I'd almost prefer that to the square metre of adverts per story that the local rag produces though.

State controlled media is certainly bad, but that is not implied by state ownership. In my experience state owned organisations provide better quality journalism than their commercial counterparts, and the gap is widening as commercial media race each other to the bottom.

Perhaps better than mainstream, ad-supported commercial counter, but that's hardly the gold standard. "Not as terrible as those who go whoring for ad dollars" isn't a ringing endorsement.

State-funded is not terribly far off, either: if funding depends to any real degree on the political climate, then the conflicts are unavoidable.

The line between state-owned and state-controlled is incredibly thin, and is only one catastrophe away from being wiped out.

That might actually be better for said news organs.

I agree about the tone. The information makes a nice enough point, but the tone is a bit much.

Edit: Also, is it normal for a post to get so many of its comments deleted? I thought we collectively moderated through scorn and disapproval, some of those comments were interesting.