Dr. DigiPol

Thank god someone in Congress gets the Internet. I remember the days when Congress ran on two IBM 3090 mainframes, one of which was kept offline as a backup in case the other went down. The one they used served both Congressional offices and the Congressional Research Service. Interestingly, during the day (7am to 7pm) CRS data analysis jobs would be bumped whenever an office processed its constituent mail. And meanwhile that other mainframe sat idle. Oh, and did I mention each of those mainframe computers was just a hair shy of being a supercomputer. How wasteful is that?

But all that has changed. Now we have Internet experts in Congress; experts like Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens. His recent explanation of how the internet works was nearly complete. All he left out of his description was how squirrels running on fly-wheels power the nation’s emergency communication infrastructure.

But Stevens’ explanation that the internet is a bunch of tubes getting clogged with movies that slow down his email is perfect. At my house, I am constantly having to go down into my basement to shake out my wireless modem (wireless modems use intangible tubes to move stuff through the air…whoops… watch out there…had to duck to avoid that YouTube video of John Stewart’s comments on Senator Stevens’ net neutrality speech). I keep an extra large trash can next to it because my Internet tubes have been getting really full ever since YouTube was launched.

Thankfully, we have astute lawmakers like Senator Stevens out there defending consumer access to the Internet. The last thing we need is stupid companies like Google and Amazon telling us how the Internet works.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Digital Politics, Rants, Raves, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.