July 17, 2006 Senators Slip of the Tongue Keeps on Truckin Over the Web By KEN BELSON NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/business/media/17stevens.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print The word is spreading: The Internet is not a big truck. Its a series of tubes. Two weeks ago Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, shared this information at a Senate committee hearing to explain why he voted against an amendment aimed at ensuring that traffic on the Internet be delivered equally, an idea known as net neutrality. And while it is true that the Internet is not a big truck, the senator might feel as if he has been run over by one. His comments have been posted on blogs, lampooned on The Daily Show and have spawned musical spinoffs, including a folk version and a techno song with the senators analogies mixed in. (A video for the latter, with shots of 1960s mainframes and big trucks, surfaced on YouTube.com on Friday.) The senators gaffes an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 oclock in the morning on Friday; I just got it yesterday are not just oratorical blunders akin to Dan Quayles spelling of potatoe. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, he has significant sway over telecommunications policies. That may explain why his comments circulated so quickly through the Internet (or tubes), especially among those in favor of a net neutrality provision. Adam Green, blogging on the DailyKos, sarcastically called Mr. Stevens one cool dude and said he had genuine information superhighway cred. The senators powerful position also raised suspicions that one of the songs making fun of him had been censored. On www.iptablog.org, Andrew Raff described how his marginally funny song was taken down from MySpace.com, where he had set up the Ted Stevens Internet Fan Club. Jeff Berman, a spokesman for Fox Interactive Media, the unit of the News Corporation that owns MySpace, said the company removed the song because Fox mistakenly thought that copyrights had been violated. When MySpace realized that no violations had been made, the song was put back up, he said. But the lesson here, Mr. Raff says, is that at least for now there are plenty of other places to speak out. The goal of the antineutrality proponents is to turn the Internet into something like the cable TV system, he wrote on his site, adding, in the senators powerful phrase, No, the Internet is not a truck. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
