Townsend is clearly aware that he going to take a certain amount of crap for making this call, so he spends no little time in the report explaining his position, particularly as it comes on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs.

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" Larry cites CEO Eric Schmidt's academic background and the academic orgins of the Internet (by which he means it's an open collaboration, not a vendor relationship.) The cool thing about the Web when it launched, he says, was that there was no real barrier to putting things online, "so people put up all sorts of crap.

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To be meaningful, such a system would have to be open to all, no matter how unknown, whilst also winnowing out submissions that are riven with typos, poor grammar, crap characters and rubbish plots.

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