our legislators at work
[from my college class listserv - the audio is remarkable]
Senator Ted Stevens, Republican from Alaska & never the sharpest
knife in the drawer to begin with, heads the Commerce Committee which
is supposed to be writing the law which will effect net neutrality.
Yet he thinks the internet is a series of “tubes”…. Here’s an
excerpt from an incomprehensible speech he gave explaining his vote
against a basic net neutrality provision which the committee tied on
11 to 11:
“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 interet 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. So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk
about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t
using it for commercial purposes. We aren’t earning anything by going
on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to
discrimnate against those people.
[…]
The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the
sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading
this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to
understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. 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. Now we have a separate
Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Do you know
why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They
can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
[…]
The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone
shows that there is something that has been done that really is a
violation of net neutraility that hits you and me.”
If you have the stomach for it, you can listen to the complete
“speech” here:
http://media.publicknowledge.org/stevens-on-nn.mp3