Senator Ted Stevens on Net Neutrality
I haven't laughed so hard at a politician since George Bush mentioned the "Internets" (plural) during the 2004 Presidential debates. Alright, I lied; politicians are always good for a laugh.
If you haven't already heard Senator Stevens' description of the Internet as a series of tubes, please give it a listen.
In his defense, Senator Stevens is in his 80s, so that's a large part of the reason he sounds intoxicated. But, whatever you think of net neutrality, it's hard to imagine these sorts of issues being deliberated by a man that had this to say about an errant email:
Although it's apparent Mr. Stevens rarely if ever uses the Internet, he actually makes some interesting points. Although his closing remarks about large content providers offering consumers a parallel network sound scary, it reminds me of my own musings on Google's purchase of dark fiber.
Where he goes wrong is in suggesting that allowing ISPs to throttle sites down won't affect users when they are using the Internet as a communications device. He's picked up on exactly the problem I was describing earlier. Your ISP wants to pretend the Internet is like cable television, but in some ways, it's also a lot like a telephone.
The truth is it's neither. But you can be sure that if your ISP thought they could get away with it, they'd throttle down Vonage so it was unusable and force you to use their own VoIP product. And as more video is distributed across the Internet, your cable company is quaking at the notion that their role in delivering video to the home may be relegated to that of a mere byte-broker.
If you haven't already heard Senator Stevens' description of the Internet as a series of tubes, please give it a listen.
In his defense, Senator Stevens is in his 80s, so that's a large part of the reason he sounds intoxicated. But, whatever you think of net neutrality, it's hard to imagine these sorts of issues being deliberated by a man that had this to say about an errant email:
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.
Although it's apparent Mr. Stevens rarely if ever uses the Internet, he actually makes some interesting points. Although his closing remarks about large content providers offering consumers a parallel network sound scary, it reminds me of my own musings on Google's purchase of dark fiber.
Where he goes wrong is in suggesting that allowing ISPs to throttle sites down won't affect users when they are using the Internet as a communications device. He's picked up on exactly the problem I was describing earlier. Your ISP wants to pretend the Internet is like cable television, but in some ways, it's also a lot like a telephone.
The truth is it's neither. But you can be sure that if your ISP thought they could get away with it, they'd throttle down Vonage so it was unusable and force you to use their own VoIP product. And as more video is distributed across the Internet, your cable company is quaking at the notion that their role in delivering video to the home may be relegated to that of a mere byte-broker.