“It (the internet) is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes”

The Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens had ‘net neutrality’ in front of him in the form of a staffer and some lobbyists working for telecom giants Verizon and AT&T.  After a few minutes the vote was secured, and fifteen minutes later the presentation was finished, a summary on paper handed over, handshakes.  What his friends have talked to him about here is billions (?) of dollars worth of bill payments from companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Sears, etc. based on the amount of people with computers and internet connections who access their site however many times. 

So a website owner pays hosting fees or buys their own hardware, pays an internet service provider (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc.) for a connection to their servers.  People with computers have paid for their own hardware and also pay an internet service provider (Same Companies) for a connection.  On both ends of the connection, a payment is made.

What the service providers are now saying to Chairman Stevens is that because Comcast collects a monthly payment from a website that attracts people with computers who might pay AT&T or Verizon their monthly payment, one of the companies might get over on the other one somehow.  Say everyone in Bakersfield, CA pays AT&T for an internet connection and they all go to Yahoo! everyday, which pays Comcast for it’s connection.  The wires from Bakersfield, CA to Yahoo! are being used and perhaps one company’s wires are used more in one instance than anothers’.

They want to get paid a third time, and since prices offered to customers is what drives sales in the industry, they can’t come to us for more money.  So they’re going after the websites for money.  Double-dipping…as if the phone companies had become their own country, established their own government, and had decided to tax twice for the same reason. 

Ridiculous argument in favor of stealing revenue from the rest of the market, but one that involves a lot of money…Chairman Stevens is a Republican.  A match made in heaven, romantic, like a round hole in the wall of a bathroom stall.  But that’s not really the most interesting thing about this story.  Instead, it’s the fact that Stevens has a position he believes in a great deal, yet talks about it like he’s either taken acid, turned into Uncle Junior from the Sopranos AND/OR still hasn’t been able to figure out the electric can opener let alone the television remote. 

I suppose these positions are about who you know or who you made happy on the other side of that hole in the wall over the years, certainly it has nothing to do with experience or expertise.  The man claims to have been sent an “internet” that got clogged up in the “tubes” for three days.  Here’s his entire speech:

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 is now going to go through the internet* 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.  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.  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 viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

Meaning, there aren’t many web hosting empires up in Alaska, so his voters won’t care…and he did say he’d meet that lobbyist in the bathroom.