Christopher Null

“Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.”

It’s been bugging me for a week, but I KNEW something sounded strangely familiar about all this… Finally it hit me:

The Google vs. Cnet backlash reminds me of Cnet’s internal blocking of the website fuckedcompany.com in 2002 (basically it was a firewall filter so users couldn’t browse there on the company-provided Internet connection). It all sounds uncannily similar: Fuckedcompany was posting slurs against Cnet employees (primarily senior management but apparently some lower-down folks as well), and some Cnet mucky muck decided Cnet staffers no longer needed to be subjected to such awfulness.

Here’s the memo

No idea if fuckedcompany is still banned from Cnet, but I do remember that friends who worked at Cnet at the time expressed frustration about having to resort to dial-up every time they wanted to check the site for news.