When illiterate senators make laws...

This is what happens when you have completely uninformed senators being fed completely silly and wrong information by large corporations -- like say maybe, oh, the telcos that want to create an (at least) two-tiered Internet. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), that brilliant man of the "Bridge to Nowhere," gave his thoughts on banning Internet freedom based on his understanding of how the Internet works in a rousing, ridiculous speech last week. An excerpt:

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". ...

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. (emphasis mine)

Such a gross misunderstanding of what the Internet is, how it's built and how it works is quite revealing as to how these jokers are making the laws. To clear this bit up without getting too technical, the Internet is specifically built to distribute large bits of information through a vast web of interconnections. You drop something "into" the Internet, and it gets broken up into millions of tiny little pieces, shoots out through the most direct pathways (not necessarily "direct" in the geographic sense, but the most expedient based on what's happening at that moment) on that web, and then reassembles itself at it's destination.

Luckily, the geeks of Slashdot have some pretty good responses:

-- Arthur Clarke once said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic;” and indeed, our senators conceive of the internet as a mysterious metaphysical entity.

-- The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did, despite the fact that he knows nothing about the subject.

-- Since when has a lack of understanding ever stopped a politician from meddling in someone else's affairs?

The fundamentals of this whole debate were nailed last week by Tim Berners-Lee, who might be qualified to speak on the subject because, oh, he invented the World Wide Web, so I'll let him have the last word:

Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

That's all. It's up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.

Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.

There have been suggestions that we don't need legislation because we haven't had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past -- it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.