Daring Fireballer John Gruber is annoyed with Joe Wilcox because Wilcox is being a bit sulky about the inability to comment on Daring Fireball (a blog that dispenses with the ubiquitous reader comments section), in order to give his side of the argument on who punched whom first in the Google vs Apple affair. Gruber will have none of it. Why, he asks, should I provide you a free podium on my lovingly and laboriously nurtured (and wildly popular) site? He does not add: especially if you are going to be taking shots at me.

I think Gruber is right on the original issue: Google has been invading Apple’s space (everyone’s space for that matter) for a while now, though Steve Jobs’s accusation that such steps by Google violates it’s own informal motto — “Don’t be evil” — is laughable (it is only in Jobs’s mind that competing against Apple is the equivalent of being evil!).

However, the argument that Gruber musters to deny Wilcox’s demand, are not the most estimable:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? […]

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. […]

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it. They don’t.

The righteousness of the last paragraph (notwithstanding the humility implied in “modicum of popularity”) would have been more palatable had it been relevant to the real and substantial issue — which is not whether others have a “right to share in” something very nice that you have built, but rather, whether building a nice soapbox gives you the right to use it to say things about others while effectively denying them an opportunity to defend their view (to the same audience).

Building very nice soap boxes is one painstaking activity. Let us say, building great software is another. There is a difference though, when it comes to their effect on the opinions of people. It is perhaps in appreciation of this difference that the law and the guidelines used by print journals impose certain responsibilities and limits on writers and what can and should be written, especially when it pertains to others. Newspapers have sections where readers and others (in particular, those critiqued in their pages) can contribute comments. They also employ a public editor or ombudsman to address such commentary or other grievances. The law provides for libel redress to varying degrees. So on.

Gruber is correct that nothing compels him to surrender space on the nice site he built (and he is quite right that nobody should feel a sense of entitlement to a comments system). I am uncertain though that much can be advanced from this rather narrow notion of fairness as correctness. Not much more is owed someone whose line of argument is to question your manliness, but I am speaking to the general reasoning offered by Gruber in the quoted section above.