What struck me about the WIRED piece, however, was its attempt at neutrality and its muted tone. [If you’re skeptical, go to the library, find a copy, and see for yourself.] WIRED never does that. It has an opinion about ever tech-related debate, usually an opinion that reflects the views of its editor, Chris Anderson, which I’ve discussed before. Elsewhere in the same issue is an article advising readers to embrace illegal downloads as a form of civil disobedience. [I’ve got plenty of free music on my computer that shouldn’t strictly speaking be there, but I’d never be so presumptuous as to pretend it was anything more than miserliness that landed it there.]

The tone of the Google piece suggests to me the major problem with WIRED. It’s a magazine about the modern technology industry written by people who helped create the modern technology industry, by people who moved out to the Valley before it was cool. Their natural instinct is to explain tech companies to the rest of us, and defend those companies from the big bad economy back East. The folks at WIRED still they think they are writing about scrappy endearing startups, even though those companies aren’t scrappy or small anymore.

Yes, this piece is an improvement over a February article that painted the attack on Google as an evil conspiracy of big bad telecom companies. But even where their own reporting suggests there’s a real antitrust case to be made against Google, their personal sympathy for the GOOG prevents them from giving the piece the kind of umph they give to everything else.

It’s all pretty ironic, since as magazine writers who work for Conde Nast, everyone at WIRED is part of the ‘old’ economy. And while they advocate that everyone else give up their content for free and celebrate that Google will own it, their own website is pretty closely protected. That’s why this blog post has no links to the current issue–it’s been mailed to subscribers in print, but it’s not yet available online.