{"id":3998,"date":"2006-07-20T15:02:31","date_gmt":"2006-07-20T22:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/2006\/07\/20\/taking-stevens-seriously\/"},"modified":"2006-07-20T15:02:31","modified_gmt":"2006-07-20T22:02:31","slug":"taking-stevens-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/20\/taking-stevens-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Stevens Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tProminent network engineers Jon Stewart and Alyssa Milano have bashed Sen. Ted Stevens for his description of the Internet, but it was actually pretty accurate. See Prof. Ed Felton’s explanation:<\/a><\/p>\n

\nI\u2019ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But\u2019s let\u2019s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, and he sounds a bit agitated. Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking in an unscripted setting? For most people, it\u2019s pretty depressing. We misspeak, drop words, repeat phrases, and mangle sentences all the time. Normally, listeners\u2019 brains edit out the errors.<\/p>\n

In this light, some of the ridicule of Stevens seems a bit unfair. He said the Internet is made up of \u201ctubes\u201d. Taken literally, that\u2019s crazy. But experts talk about \u201cpipes\u201d all the time. Is the gap between \u201ctubes\u201d and \u201cpipes\u201d really so large? And when Stevens says that his staff sent him \u201can Internet\u201d and it took several days to arrive, it sounds to me like he meant to say \u201can email\u201d and just misspoke.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s take Stevens seriously, and consider the possibility that somewhere in his head, or in the head of a staffer telling him what to say, there was a coherent argument that was supposed to come out of Stevens\u2019 mouth but was garbled into what we heard. Let\u2019s try to reconstruct that argument and see if it makes any sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not that we want to interfere with anybodys good time, mind you, but Stevens understands computers and the Internet better than say, Jon Stewart. And Stewart’s slam pretty well hits the Neuts in the face: if you believe Stevens is a clueless moron, why do you insist that he impose new and unprecedented regulations on the Internet for you?\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prominent network engineers Jon Stewart and Alyssa Milano have bashed Sen. Ted Stevens for his description of the Internet, but it was actually pretty accurate. See Prof. Ed Felton’s explanation: I\u2019ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But\u2019s let\u2019s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a … Continue reading “Taking Stevens Seriously”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-net-neutrality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-12u","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}