Several people today, among them Peio wrote on this subject.
I remembered that last year senator Stevens also had an opinion about the Internet: “It is a series of tubes”. Boingboing reported his words:
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…
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 its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
You can see and hear the senator at Jon Stewart’s show: here (The Internet tubes will be delayed by anyone who puts enormous amounts of material in them) and here (John Hodgman explains the Net Neutrality Act and distinguishes between a dump truck and a series of tubes.)
Compare sen. Stevens with a Bulgarian colleague of his: MP Pavel Shopov:
Here are some quotes from (по his speech at the Bulgarian National Assembly (I’ve tried to translate as close as possible to his vocabulary!). They are discussing a proposal to publish the State Gazette online.
“But, what is Internet? Yes, it is a network, and it consists of many subjects, but they play in one whole, which is the Internet. This whole is a subject in an economy world, in the legal world, as a juridical subject and juridical subjects. With the proposal, as it is made, we are favoring one subject, we favor Internet at the expense of other participants, other players on the market fo information, as are the well-known Daxi, Ciela, Norma and others.”
and:
“I can calmly say that this is just lobbying. The lobbyist is the author of the law. Mr. Dimitrov, lobbyists are the other MPs, co-authors of the law. They lobby for some players on the information market, for the so-called Internet-operators, for the participants in this big economic scheme – Internet, in which market there is a lot of money, millions. They are lobbying in favor of these players at the expense of other, also sovereign, independent, having the right to participate players on the information market, such as the other companies, normal companies, which distribute information.
and more:
What I am going to say, of course, will look like a heresy for some people, who consider that Internet is the alpga and omega of the modern world. Yes, Internet is probably a wonderful thing, indeed is a wonderful thing, but it is not the only thing. Internet is a global net. Long live the Internet! This is something like electrification of the Soviets, this is what your uncle Lenin has said, right?
According to Peio, this is idiotism. I don’t agree. Idiots like the good soldier Shveik, for example, are cool and good to know about.
Mr. Shopov’s statement reminds me of the words of one other MP from the 2000 National Assembly on the topic of computer crimes. “What is a computer crime? To steal a computer, or to have your computer stolen? Why do we have to criminalize these crimes?” To which the logical answer was that a computer crime is when I grab the computer in my hand, and start to beat the MP on his head with it.
Or in other words, Mr. Shopov’s statement shows incompetence, lack of knowledge on the subject and probably his desire to have an opinion for the sake of speaking. Actually I am not interested in his motives, what bothers me is that we pay his salary in order to listen to such speeches.