Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

The Internet is a Series of Tubes

This is being blogged everywhere, but I just can’t resist mentioning it here. Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, took it upon himself to describe the Internet to us, in the course of explaining why he’s against Net Neutrality:

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.

[...]

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 I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

This is possibly one of the funniest, most pathetic displays of proud, wilful ignorance I’ve seen since … well, since Bush last said something, about anything. But it’s hard to laugh too long here, because Stevens and people like him are making actual policy based on their ludicrous misapprehensions.

I don’t have anything against not knowing stuff, because that would make me a hypocrite. You could drive a universe through the vast, ragged holes in my understanding of pretty much everything. But still … I wouldn’t legislate based on my ignorance, and neither should Stevens.

So, yeah, I don’t want or expect him to grasp all the details of how the Internet works. But if he’s going to be making important decisions about the future of what’s arguably the most important communications medium in the world, he should fucking ask somebody.

This posting raises some interesting questions regarding our lawmakers understanding of the subject matter for which they are creating legislation. I think the Internet example in your posting is poignant, but probably only a single stroke in a very large painting.

Is he even speaking English? It’s like some weird twins language, but without an actual twin who can understand it.

We should totally send him an internet asking him what the hell he’s talking about.

But not all at the same time. We might clog the tubes.