One of the most wonderful things about the Senate Commerce Committee is that it is chaired by a doddering old man from Alaska who rarely demonstrates a clear understanding of the technologies his committee oversees. Not that we should be surprised about relative tech ignorance on Capitol Hill, where enough Congresscritters were willingly bamboozled by a CD full of static that the NAB claimed represented the interference caused by a 100 watt station to a multi-thousand watt station.
Wired’s 27B Stroke 6 blog highlights a stupefying portion of Alaska’s Ted Steven’s comments on network neutrality and the internet from last week:
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 […]
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.
For a round-up of some less confused, more disingenuous interpretations of net neutrality from members of the House, listen to the June 9 edition of Media Minutes [direct link to MP3 – 4.8 MB].
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