ABSTRACT
On 30 June 2006, Ted Stevens, U.S. senator from Alaska, stated in a Senate hearing on an amendment inserting some very basic net neutrality provisions into a moving telecommunications bill:1
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the
internet commercially. So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and
me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes. We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not
saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people. The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory
in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet.” No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the
internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they
are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. … Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be
able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
