Last week we saw the broadcast and print media pick up on Senator Ted Steven’s “series of tubes” speech after it consumed the blogosphere. Most of these stories focused on the comedy of the word “tubes”. Many offered the apology that his analogy was sound, but he just used the word “tubes” instead of the more commonly used “pipes”. But there is more to the story of the Senator’s statement. He clearly doesn’t understand the issue of net neutrality.

To make his point against net neutrality, Stevens quotes from a short simple editorial in the International Herald Tribune. partially quoting, he says:

In Europe, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia are among the corporate voices starting to express this view. Deutsche Telekom plans to spend €3 billion, or $3.8 billion, on building a fiber-optic network with 25 times the speed of today’s broadband, and it wants to keep competitors off the network.

But the European Commission believes the German telecommunications market is not competitive enough for such a restriction. The commission is by and large following precedents set by EU white papers as far back as the Bangemann Report of 1993 by calling for interoperability and minimal regulation.

My biggest fear in this debate is that we don’t know enough about the consequences to turn the Internet into a two-tier system, which is exactly what those who are pleading for net neutrality want to do.

Senator Stevens’ stated logic for not supporting net neutrality legislation is: 1) In Europe, there is not sufficient competition to allow telecoms to deny competitors access to their networks. Networks should be interoperable. 2) We don’t know enough about turning the Internet into a two-tier system.

These points, to anyone familiar with the issue, would be categorized as arguments for net neutrality, not against. Stevens incorrectly (or if correctly, then with no explanation offered) identified net neutrality advocates as wanting to create a two tier system.

He then goes on to say that real non-discrimination is a consumer bill of rights that includes protection from viruses and child pornography. In the context of a discussion of net neutrality, this is utter nonsense.
Stevens’ use of language shows a lack of understanding. Every entity that uses the Internet, from YouTube to someone checking their email is a consumer of the Internet. Separating the Internet into producers and consumers a la the old broadcast media model, effectively killing the open Internet we enjoy today, is exactly the kind of outcome net neutrality advocates fear.

Stevens tries, with much difficulty, to talk about how bandwidth intensive services interfere with smaller communications like email. However, net neutrality opponents usually speak of how non-time sensitive communication like email should take a back seat to time sensitive applications like streaming movies and VoIP. The provision he voted against doesn’t even prohibit an ISP from favoring VoIP over email. It just prohibited an ISP from favoring its own services over that of a competitor.

Listen to Senator Stevens entire statement at the public knowledge blog. You can decide for yourself whether or not he understands the issue.