July 4, 2006

Kathy Gill had one of the quotes of the year last weekend when she stated that "geeks should not be allowed to name things". We should not be endorsing Net Neutrality but should be rallying against Net Discrimination

We should be rallying against any system that allows one packet's priority to be placed lower than another packet.

In the mean time, Senator Stevens from Alaska describes the internet as a series of tubes. Not, I think, like tubes you would find in an old radio but more like the pneumatic tubes that used to be found in department stores back when there were no cash registers and all the cash transactions were handled in a small hidden cash room on a lower floor. The cash used to pay for the goods purchased was sent to the central cashier through the tube and change returned. These are the same tubes that are still at bank drive up windows. These pneumatic tubes were high tech for their day replacing a series of baskets on strings. These tubes however, have extremely limited bandwidth as only one transaction could be in a tube at a time and each transaction had to be routed directly to it's destination. I'm sure the Senator remembers them well. They were surely around when he was in his prime. This, however, is not a good analogy for the internet, The total lack of understanding of Senator Stevens, who is in charge of the Commerce Committee of the US Senate, shows that he is willing to listen to the wrong description for the right price.