Success Quote by Meg Whitman

Calling the internet a "public relations disaster" is a wonderfully corporate way to describe a civilization-scale shift that simply refused to sit still for message discipline. Whitman’s phrasing carries the voice of a CEO who’s spent years watching institutions try to treat the Net like a product launch: control the narrative, manage the stakeholders, smooth the rough edges. The joke, if she doesn’t quite mean it as one, is that the Net’s messiness is the point. It’s not broken PR; it’s an ecosystem that makes PR harder.

The line works because it concedes the chaos without conceding defeat. "Sort of interesting" is a classic executive hedge: a softener that signals she’s about to critique something big without sounding alarmist. "In some ways" is another escape hatch, narrowing culpability and inviting agreement from people who remember the bad headlines: scams, porn panics, piracy, anonymity, misinformation, and the recurring shock that ordinary users can publish, coordinate, and misbehave at scale.

Then comes the pivot: "the fundamentals are really good". That’s the ballast. Whitman is arguing for an investor’s patience and a builder’s optimism. The subtext is early- to mid-2000s e-commerce logic: despite reputational noise, the architecture of the Net - distribution, searchability, low transaction costs, global reach - is sound. She’s not praising the culture; she’s underwriting the infrastructure. The intent is to separate surface scandal from underlying value, reassuring markets (and perhaps regulators) that the medium is not a moral panic, it’s a platform - and a profitable one for those who can operate in public, without expecting the public to behave.