TechDirt catches senator in a little bit of tech, um, dirt!

Robert,

For people who work at smaller companies, or organizations that are less IT-centric, their data will indeed come in through a single tube.

I work at Isilon, a still-smallish storage vendor here in Seattle. We've had problems moving over to our new fiber, and so our transfer rate to our own FTP server at a co-location facility less than a mile from our office often drops to as little as 15K/sec. (Customers can hit it at upwards of 300K/sec.)

At home, I share my DSL connection with my wife and several neighbors. When someone's bittorrenting something, we're all affected. I've worked at smallish Web hosting companies with three or four separate high-speed links from different providers, and a well-run denial of service attack was able to make all of our customers' sites unavailable. (Heck, a well-run Warez site was able to do that, too, if I'm remembering properly.)

It seems to me that Senator Stevens' comment is based on his local site's infrastructure. Is he generalizing over-broadly? I don't think so; I've seen all kinds of times where an outage or routing problem at one provider affects thousands of sites.

I suspect that we're mostly insulated from the costs of running those big fat pipes, but the costs are real, and no less real for an ISP than for anyone else.

The Internet isn't free, even if you're not being charged.

Robert, while his definition isn't exact, he does hit on some good points. He didn't say it was a "single tube", he said it was a "bunch of tubes". Before you knock him, perhaps you'd better do your own research as well. How many times have we seen a single network segment go down that doesn't allow us to hit parts of the internet? Our routes through the internet aren't all dynamic. I've seen times when I haven't been able to hit websites from my home network, but if I remote desktop into my personal servers in Virginia and Dallas I can hit the same sites that aren't working on my home box. For being a law-maker, I think he actually has a better grasp of what's going on than most of my family members do.

He isn't contradicting himself either. He asked for legislation to control what is allowed to be aired on cable. I imagine he would be in favor of the same decency being asked for on the internet. He's against legislation that would limit how businesses decide to do business as long as it doesn’t involve showing fisting in plain site of 5 year olds.

I note Google has let it be known that it may well be lawsuit time if silly games depriving independents of fair service and pricing are tried.

J. Lasser: if you think the Internet is a series of pipes with limited capacity you seriously need to study how the Internet works. There isn't one "pipe" between me and you. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands. My words are split up into little pieces. One piece might go through Russia before hitting your browser. Another piece might go through Japan. So, where's the bottleneck?

The bottleneck USUALLY is actually on your own server infrastructure. Not anywhere on the Internet.

Hell, if you are hosting stuff with a large enough host my words might not even come from only one server (WordPress, for instance, has more than one and can serve out bits from different cities, even). (Google's bits come to you from thousands of servers all over the world).

For some reason, I'm not at all appalled by Senator Stevens' grasp of the Internet. (Neither is Techdirt, it seems, but you seem to be appalled, Robert.)

He seems to understand that the Internet has more-or-less limited throughput capacity, and slowdowns or queueing may result from attempts to transmit more than that amount of data.

Now, I'll agree that this isn't a good argument against net neutrality, but as an understanding of why things can be slow on the Internet, and why net neutrality is a legitimate subject for debate, it seems perfectly reasonable, at a layman's level.

Personally, I'm for net neutrality, but -- like the end-to-end-principle -- some techies think that it's God's writ and not subject to debate. I figure (in both cases) that if it benefits somebody and is technically possible, it's a fine thing to debate, and disagreeing with me on that topic makes you neither a moron nor the devil. (Even if, as in both these cases, it likely makes you a money-grubbing self-interested jerk.)

Inconsistent? No, illogical maybe. Stevens' grasp of the internet may be appalling, but he is voting the typical conservative ideology: the government should regulate our lives as little as possible – except when it comes to sexual morality. That should be legislated to the max. They are all really quite consistent on that.

Of course, liberals demonstrate a similar logical gap when they insist that the full force of government should be employed to solve all manner of social evils – unless, of course, the subject is sex, which should always be treated as a matter of personal choice.

I can’t explain it, but there’s something about the subject of sex that just whacks all the sense right out of Americans.