Wired Blog has a very interesting article up about the Net Neutrality amendment that is in a tie right now in the Senate Commerce Committee. The following are some excerpts of what Senator Ted Stevens (R-AL) had to say about it.
There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn’t going to go through the interent and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
This speech was on Wednesday. So who out there sends an email on Friday and it doesn’t get delivered until the following Wednesday? Now I am not calling Senator Stevens a liar, but consider this – the Senate has their own email server (as do all government agencies, departments, etc.). He sent the email to a staffer so it is a safe assumption that it went from a senate.gov to a senate.gov email address. This means it was all handled internally. What does that mean? Yeah – the Senate’s servers are screwed up, not the internet. I can send an email from here in Ohio to friends in the U.K. and they get it within 2 minutes.
Now let’s look at this classic statement right here:
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
TUBES?!? Wow is someone living in the past. Excuse me while I turn my black and white television down and eject this 8-track tape. Who in the hell does he think he is kidding and why in the world didn’t someone say to him “sir – you are making a total fool of yourself”. Commerce is dependent upon technology and the person we have heading the United States Senate Commerce Committee thinks the internet and computers in the year 2006 run off of tubes! With this kind of idiotic language, it is no wonder that the United States is falling behind rapidly in the tech world.
Senator Ted Stevens – get on your horse and buggy and drag your sorry ass back to Alaska and stay there.