Monte

Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, currently the longest serving Republican in the Senate, is chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and is opposed to Net neutrality. In a speech the senator gave on June 28, 2006, he reasoned why the telecom industry should be allowed to charge content providers for higher priority access to Internet consumers. Also in his convoluted speech, the 83-year-old Senator compared the Internet to a “series of tubes”:

“What the senator is talking about is allowing all of these entities that support this, uh, to provide streaming sub… going on the, on the Internet. Now the Internet, you know. Let’s go back. The Internet started with the concept of local to local connections across the country and… and you can go through Alaska but you only had to go through local connections to get there. The industry wisely provided for, uh, streaming, in effect, new kind of long distance, and that’s what we got, we got a service that’s immune to this, and it’s there for the consumer. But when we take and, uh, really, uh, indicate that anyone that wants to use the… this system for massive massive, uh, commercial purposes…

There’s one company now that you can, you can sign up and get a movie delivered to your house daily, by subscription service, by delivery service, okay? And, uh, currently comes to your house, put in a mail box, you get home, and hand in your… you change your order, but you pay for that, right? This service is now going to go through the Internet, and what you do is you just go through a place on the Internet and you order your movie, and guess what. You can order 10 of them and deliver to you, and there is… delivery charge is free, right? 10 movies streaming across that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet?

I just the other day got Internet was sent to me by my staff at 10 in the morning by my staff, and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up in all these things that are going on the Internet commercially! And here we have this one situation where enormous entities want to use Internet for their purpose to save money for doing what they’re doing now! They use Fedex, they use delivery service, they use the mail. They deliver in other ways, but 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 a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they’re filled when you put your message in, it gets in line, it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material…”

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show compared Stevens to “a crazy old man in an airport bar at 3 AM.” I’d have to agree. It’s scary to think that this man is in charge of Internet legislation.

I have somewhat mixed feelings regarding Net neutrality. On one hand, I feel that major telecoms have proved they cannot be trusted. The FCC recently fined Madison River Communications, an ISP in North Carolina, $15,000 after they determined that the carrier was blocking its customers from accessing Vonage’s VoIP service. Vonage has also sued a number of other ISPs for purposely degrading their service. This anti-competitve behavior and vertical integration make me a little uneasy. And it’s obvious that Stevens is sitting in the pocket of some telecom lobbyist—the man is under the impression that his emails aren’t going through because the Internet is clogged. But on the other hand, I’m normally opposed to government interference, and I can see how regulation might possibly stifle future innovation of the Internet’s infrastructure.

As of right now, it looks as if Net neutrality legislation will not come to pass. So for now, we’ll just have to keep putting our trust in those friendly, consumer-oritented telecoms.