Our lawmakers explain the Internet

If it wasn't enough to be known as the Senator who wanted the bridge to nowhere, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska has probably secured a permanent place in history, right along with Al "I invented the Internet" Gore, as the Senator who said this:

"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."

Senator "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens is fast becoming the laughingstock of the Internet with this remark, which sounds suspiciously like how a lobbyist might try to explain it to a lawmaker. There is a place for analogy (I like to use the roads analogy), but when you are making laws that will effect the work and livelihood of hundreds of millions of Americans, you have an obligation to take the time to truly understand the issues.

It is frightening to think this guy is a key lawmaker. Here is a Wired article with more on Stevens and his tubes, but there are already many thousands of comments and commentary on this. Oddly, Stevens may have done all of us a big favor by revealing his deep ignorance of the topic. It may now be much harder to get a pro-telecom bill passed.

And just to be clear, while multimedia does tend to slow things down under certain conditions, that problem does not require massive Federal legislative meddling to fix--Stevens wants to basically hand the keys to the Internet over to the cable and telephone companies. If he thinks the "tube" problem is bad now, wait until the "tubes" are managed by the telephone and cable companies.

Knowledge Democracy: