Senator Stevens Speaks on Net Neutrality

Audio MP3 here.

"Senator Stevens just doesn’t get it. The excitement of the Internet isn’t that it’s a niftier TV. In part, it’s that “consumers” get to choose among tens of millions of media voices, in whatever combination they want. Even better, “consumers” can use the internet to create, refine, and post content, even high-bandwidth content, for next to nothing.

On today’s internet, “consumers” are also editors, creators, and promoters. In other words, we’re not just consumers. We’re users, which means we all get an online voice. This is built on the backbone of a neutral internet.

Amusingly, Stevens claims that it took him 5 days to get an email due to internet congestion—no doubt caused by all these commercial download services clogging the internet pipes with their infernal video (and not paying their fair share).

In all due respect, Sir, you may be mistaken about the dates here. Even if not, you certainly don’t have a reasonable explanation for why your email was delayed for five days"