The voice of Internet regulation

Alaska's Ted Stevens isn't the biggest recipient of telecom cash, but he's raked in more than $130,000 from them and he's the most outspoken advocate of allowing those companies to regulate the web by charging sites for speedier transfer of data. If, say, Barnes & Noble forks over to AT&T but Amazon doesn't, AT&T customers will find that they can access the latter in a flash, while Amazon's site is slower. It sounds suspiciously like an extortion racket-- "Nice site ya got there... sure be a shame if nobody saw it."

Here's Ted Stevens demonstrating that he has absolutely no idea what he's talking about:

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. (. . .)

[Commercial websites?] 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.

The whole thing is worth a read, but it contributes to that awful sensation of the country being run by hogs at the corporate trough.