As of January 21st, the controversial NoFollow tag became a fait accompli at Wikipedia. Ten days later, I blogged about how I thought that the NoFollow tag meant a better online democracy. In response to Andy Beard's comment, I decided to weigh in with a memo to the video record, and said how I thought that if Google and Yahoo pushed the NoFollow on everyone else but didn't play by the same rules, they'd possibly be culpable under anti-trust legislation.

In response to that, Andy blew my mind by speculating on the far-reaching extent of what such litigation might look like. However, I didn't fully agree with his point about feuding blogs. On Feb. 5th, he wrote:

Yes it could be an antitrust thing, but then again if it ever came to that, the damages could be astronomical. Imagine all the startups current vying for various types of paid links whose customers are unofficially being warned off paid linkage. [...]

If a company has thousands of dollars in advertising revenue available, it is likely they have some kind of useful product that people buy. They just don’t happen to have a friendly site that is a massive authority able to give them instant authority status overnight.
[...]
If you have people battling against each other, they shouldn’t be using nofollow, because they are quite often using quotations.

Here is my response...