Senator's reputation as an enlightened tech user gets bashed Posted 7/16/2006 5:28 PM ET
By Liz Ruskin Anchorage Daily News http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2006-07-16-stevens-tubes_x.htm?POE=TECISVA ANCHORAGE Sen. Ted Stevens is enduring no end of ridicule in the blogosphere for his recent explanation, in a Commerce Committee debate, of how the Internet works. "The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes," he said during a June 28 committee session. "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 it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material." At another point in his 11-minute discourse, he said he'd seen these delays firsthand: "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." Internet pundits greeted his explanations with a non-stop snigger fest, with extra helpings of derision, on sites such as boingboing, Daily Kos, Fark, MySpace and YouTube. "Ted Stevens, unfrozen caveman senator," was the pronouncement on Wonkette. Stevens' staff director on the Commerce Committee, Lisa Sutherland, said the bloggers are making fun of Stevens for a pretty minor mistake using the "tubes" rather than "pipes." The latter is common slang in the telecom industry, especially when discussing the Internet carrying capacity of phone lines or cable. Stevens, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is pushing a rewrite of the nation's fundamental communications act. His online critics say his speech shows he's not the right person to make modern communications policy. He's had few defenders in the blog world, and the episode has also been mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Times of London. The Stevens entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia already includes a lengthy recap of the tube speech and its aftermath. The transcript of his remarks, and links to the recording itself, have been circulating like crazy. Blog viewers can find a tube T-shirt design, a PowerPoint cartoon and a Ted Stevens techno remix, which has Stevens repeating "a series of tubes!" and extended umm-ing and err-ing. By Friday, the techno remix was being celebrated in a video showing all manner of vacuum tubes, pneumatic tubes and other 1950s-style technology. Bits of Stevens' speech aired on Comedy Central's The Daily Show this week. Host Jon Stewart had an alternate explanation for why it took so long for Stevens to receive his staff's e-mail: "Maybe it's because you do not seem to know jack [BLEEP] about computers or the Internet ... but hey, you're just the guy in charge of regulating it." Snorting loudest are bloggers mad at Stevens for not adding a non-discrimination provision known as "net neutrality" to the communications bill Stevens wants Congress to pass this year. Communications lobbyists particularly those who side with him on "net neutrality," but also some who don't say Stevens is getting a bad rap. They say he was employing an analogy in the tubes statement. He understands communications technology issues just fine, they say, however inarticulate he may have sounded at one particular moment. Stevens, many attest, is a BlackBerry junkie who sometimes has his thumbs flying over the device during meetings. "Sen. Stevens chaired 26 hearings and sat through a half-dozen listening sessions (on communications issues), some that lasted an entire day," Sutherland said. "I can tell you from personal conversations with him almost daily on these topics that he understands the technical, the legal, and the economic aspects of new technologies and how they will be deployed ... throughout the nation." At the heart of the barbs is Stevens' stance on "net neutrality." It is a polarizing, complicated issue that has, on the one side, the corporations that bring the Internet to consumers' homes and offices such as AT&T, BellSouth and cable companies. In the other corner are the companies that provide the services people use on the Internet most prominently Google, craigslist, eBay and Microsoft. The content providers say that without new laws, the telephone and cable companies will become self-serving Internet gatekeepers, letting traffic flow quickly to vendors with whom they have a financial affiliation and trickle to their competitors. The phone and cable companies, on the other hand, say they wouldn't do anything to compromise Internet freedom, and if they tried to, their customers would dump them for another Internet provider. But they say the net neutrality protections proposed would hamper innovation. ================================ 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]
