Is there a public interest in reading news about products in which the public is interested? Apple, and the judge who ruled in favor of its request to discover an on-line journalist's confidential sources, argue that there is not. But as on old-time computer trade press hack, I'd like to offer a reason why I believe there is. It's called FUD.
Of course, you know what FUD is, but it's clear the judge who ruled on Friday that Apple can paw through the PowerPage weblog's e-mail to try to identify leaks does not. "An interested public is not the same as the public interest," the judge noted in his decision. But he seemed genuinely perplexed as to "why citizens have a right to know the private and secret information of a business entity, be it Apple, HP, a law firm, a newspaper, Coca-Cola, a restaurant, or anyone else." As he sees it, bloggers and even mainstream journalists who "are doing nothing more than feeding the public's insatiable desire for information" aren't entitled to protect the identity of sources who violated a duty of confidentiality to that business entity.
So to explain as briefly as possible how the technology business has long worked, FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and it's a term that was first used to describe IBM's marketing tactics in its heyday. With its dominant market position, IBM learned how to scare customers away from competitors with a combination of promises and threats about its future product plans. Grand announcements would be made for products that would never ship or would come nowhere near having the features or performance IBM had claimed when getting customers to commit to the Big Blue vision of the future.
Of course, while IBM's dominance waned, FUD did not. The fast pace of change, as well as the need for interoperability among products from multiple vendors, has meant that all sorts of companies in the technology business have employed FUD marketing tactics to their benefit. If a company is years away from matching the capabilities of a competitor, it can just announce some vaporware and say it will ship next quarter. If a product needs to be rushed to market while it still has serious bugs, get the customers to put their money down first and promise them bug fixes later. And if only idiots would buy your current product once they hear how much better and cheaper the new version will be, try to keep the new product a secret until the chumps have bought up your unsold inventory.
We aren't talking about scandalous, whistle-blowing behavior here -- we're talking about everyday business practices. And, yes, Apple and Coca-Cola (I guess it didn't occur to the judge to reference Pepsi instead) and everyone else has the right - and, indeed, the duty to their shareholders -- to try to keep information from leaking to the press that might adversely impact their bottom line. I still don't see how the revelation of any of these alleged "trade secrets" in the blog stories actually harm Apple, but be that as it may. If a company can discover the source of a leak who had a duty of confidentiality to the company, they can take whatever action the law allows.
But the press has a duty, too, and that's to give our readers the information they need to see through the FUD and to make informed purchase decisions. In the past, that duty has often not been performed as nearly as well as it should be, because the easy thing to do was to just print the stuff that the vendors would spoon feed you. And one of the great things about weblogs and online publishing in general is that "news" sources that just re-print press releases are becoming extinct. Or at least they were. Unfortunately, as long as Friday's decision stands, journalists of all types are served notice that they can be treated like criminals for printing a truth about a company that it labels a secret.
So what's the public interest in knowing the truth about the products they might buy? It's that if all we are allowed to know is what the vendor doesn't want to keep secret, then FUD means that sometimes all we will know will be lies. The public does have an insatiable desire for information, and it is in the public interest that bloggers, trade rag hacks, and all kinds of journalists be allowed to at least try to deliver it.
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