This is a review of the preprint "Frequent lack of repressive capacity of promoter DNA methylation identified through genome-wide epigenomic manipulation" by Ethan Edward Ford, Matthew R. Grimmer, Sabine Stolzenburg, Ozren Bogdanovic, Alex de Mendoza, Peggy J. Farnham, Pilar Blancafort, and Ryan Lister.The preprint was originally posted on bioRxiv on September 20, 2017 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/170506).