The Internet: “a series of tubes”
I may be the last person on earth to learn about this. Back in late June, Senator Ted Stevens (R, AK) regaled the Commerce Committee with a nearly 11-minute rant about his opposition to a proposed net neutrality amendment to a communications bill. That may not sound very interesting, but it was Sen. Stevens’s… unique attempt at explaining the workings of the Internet that brought this otherwise obscure speech to public attention.
Ten movies streaming across that— 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; I got it yesterday. Why?
Whoa, his staff was sending the whole Internet to him! I guess he must’ve been doing a lot of research to prepare for his big net neutrality speech, right?
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 big truck. It’s— it’s a series of tubes!
There you have it folks, the truth about how the Internet works. Forget everything you’ve ever heard about routers, switches, and protocols: it’s all tubes.
These quotes don’t really do the Senator’s speech justice; you have to hear the whole thing to fully appreciate it’s addle-brained wackiness.
Within days of the audio’s release onto the Web, people were struggling to describe Stevens’s impressive oratory style. One astute MeFi commenter pegged it as “Elmer Fudd meets a buggy version of Max Headroom.” Cory Doctorow said, “it’s like hearing a caveman expound on the future of silver-birds-from-sky and why we need to keep them from flying so high they anger the gods.”
Personally, the best way I can describe it is that it’s like listening to a rant from the crack-headed love child of Foghorn Leghorn and Porky Pig.
As is often the case, the icing on this surreal piece of American political cake comes from The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart:
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net neutrality, Ted Stevens, humor, government, politics, WTF, tubes, series of tubes, the internets
This video demonstrates exactly why we at Hands Off the Net are against Congressional regulation of the Internet. Ted Stevens’ comments reveal exactly how little Congress understands about the Internet and why any attempts on its part to regulate the Net would be disastrous.
Comment by HandsOff — November 19, 2006 @ 11:13 pm
Ted Stevens may be clueless, but at least he’s been on the Intarweb. Larry King hasn’t — and refuses to.
Comment by tom sherman — November 22, 2006 @ 11:41 am
@HandsOff: One of the most bizarre things about Stevens’s speech is that he seems to claim that the net neutrality advocates are the ones that want to create a two-tiered Internet, and that this artificial regulation is what he’s objecting to. He spends about half his time stammering out a half-baked argument which — once deciphered — seems to favor the amendment he’s opposing. The other half of his speech is an almost unintelligible rant that seems to argue for a two-tiered system. The whole thing is just surreal.
I think that educating our governing officials may ultimately be pointless. The ones who favor breaking net neutrality do so because the big telecommunications companies that donate to their campaigns tell them to. The targets for outreach should be conservative voters.
Conservatives are supposed to favor small government and deregulation. Voters who feel strongly about those notions need to understand that the net was created to be neutral to different kinds of information from different providers. Doing anything else involves imposing regulations and new infrastructure to support the change. And it’s not a change that serves the interests of the American people. Its only purpose is to enrich the telco giants by letting them pick the pockets of consumers and content providers.
A lot of centrist and liberal voters already oppose attempts to break net neutrality based on the civil liberties and freedom-of-speech problems such an action would cause. If conservatives were also rallied to the cause by framing it as a matter of excessive (and corrupt) regulation of the free market, the bipartisan momentum could finally crush the efforts of the anti-neutrality forces once and for all.
Comment by Adam Messinger — November 23, 2006 @ 4:34 pm
@Tom Sherman: At least Larry King is relatively harmless. Ted Stevens can actually affect public policy, which makes him a dangerous liability.
The good news is that he’s on his way out as chair of the Commerce Committee. The new Democratic majority means new committee leadership, and right now it looks like Daniel Inouye (HI) will be taking up the top spot on the Commerce Committee. Inouye is a supporter of net neutrality, so things are looking a little better for our cause these days.
Comment by Adam Messinger — November 23, 2006 @ 4:51 pm