It seems that all the pundits and comedians have taken shots at Al Gore over the years for his supposed claim that he invented the internet. The quote from Gore was taken out of context; he never believed that he actually made the internet, but he did do something very important for it: he supported legislation that created an environment where the internet was allowed to thrive. The topic is little tough to get into here without providing dozens of citations to prove my point, but go research it yourself. The internet as we know it would not exist without legislation championed by Al Gore while he was a senator from Tennessee.

So what does this have to do with modern times? Well, as some of you may know, Net Neutrality has been a hot topic in the past year among techies. Their position is simple: all web traffic should be treated the same from the provider's (mostly cable companies, these days) perspective. They should not be allowed to force website owners to pay extra for "premium services," like a website that loads in less than 5 minutes.

Without Net Neutrality, the cable companies will be able to charge premiums for what they have called "premium services." This is absurd, because what they would be allowed to do is essentially blackmail the internet. Oh, you want your website to load at normal speed? That'll be an extra $1 a month per gigabyte. If you don't pay, we'll just throttle the speed your page loads, so that nobody will want to visit your site. If you still don't pay, we'll throttle your speed down even more, so your website is almost completely unusable.

The network operators say they need to charge extra for these "premium services," which is better known today as the internet we all use, because they have to recoup investments they've made in infrastructure. That makes no sense, because if they need to make more money they should just increase their rates. That's how other businesses do it. Does Pepsi charge extra for a soda that doesn't have a hypodermic needle in it?

So where does Congress stand on all of this? Well, Republicans voted against Net Neutrality, saying the network operators needed to charge these extra fees and Silicon Valley has been getting a free ride. Of course, it only takes a brief amount of research to find that lobbyists for the cable companies and network operators are so deep in the Republican's pockets they're getting trapped in the lint.

Ted Stevens, a Republican senator from Alaska and one of the most corrupt politicians in modern times, became famous for his speech relating to this issue. He explained how the internet works to his collegues with the classic line "it's not a dump truck, it's made of tubes". He also said that he sent an email to an aide and it took over a day to reach him. He diagnosed the cause of his email problem as a "clogged internet".

This is the kind of idiocy that controls our country. He thinks charging big internet companies like Google extra money so their website loads will solve his little email problem. I don't know why his email took over a day to make it to his aide's inbox. It probably didn't. I'm sure it made it in a minute or less, but the aide didn't act on it and then claimed he never got the email to cover his own ass. I've never heard of an email taking a day to reach it's destination, I'm not even sure how that would be possible, unless several major internet backbones went down. It's nearly impossible to bring them down due to regular traffic. Even a very powerful virus would have trouble bringing them down.

Ted Stevens gets very upset when anyone challenges him, and he's sure to defend his lobbyist friends to the grave. Fortunately for the rest of us, Democrats are in control now, and they favor Net Neutrality. It will be that little-talked about issue that once again saves the internet. I'm not sure what Democrat will take credit for it, but let's not laugh at them this time. Let's think about what the internet would have become if Republicans had remained in control.
What the Democrats' win means for tech | CNET News.com