In “Leaked Cables Stir Resentment and Shrugs,” and “Leaks Don’t Strain Gulf State Ties, Clinton Says,” my colleagues Alan Cowell and Mark Landler both report on the apparently limited impact of the leaked diplomatic cables, so far.

After all the heated calls for violence to be used to stop the publication of these leaked documents, the apparent lack of dramatic consequences in the first days after the leak might surprise some readers. In that regard, it seems worth noting that this is a record of diplomatic traffic, not intelligence reports, and it is material that was only considered sensitive enough to restrict access beyond a pool of up to 3 million government officials.

According to WikiLeaks, more than half (133,887 to be precise) of the 250,000 documents it obtained are unclassified, and most of the remaining cables (101,748 of them) are marked “confidential,” and bear dates suggesting that they would have been made public just a decade after they were written. A look at some of the remaining 15,000 that were marked “secret,” indicates that they too would have been made available to the public 20 years after they were written.

So most of the documents, in a sense, simply give readers a chance to fast-forward one or two decades and read information that would then have been available to historians and journalists.

That said, while there is still no way of predicting what, exactly, the impact of the documents released so far and yet to be released will have, it might be argued that the leak will ultimately be more important for the issues it has raised about press freedoms and privacy in the Internet age.

Readers interested in those questions should consult a Columbia Journalism Review interview with Ethan Zuckerman, who studies the Web at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, headlined, “ Why Amazon Caved.”

Here is part of Mr. Zuckerman’s interesting reflection on what the decision by Amazon to stop hosting WikiLeaks.org this week means: