These are the people making decisions about the future of the internet

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.

Perhaps he meant email? And maybe their email server was down?

And let’s not forget:

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.

[...]

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.

Well, gee, Senator Stevens, that makes so much sense! I know at my work, we also have our own “internet” that runs between our two remote offices so we can guarantee service between them. And I think that should nicely translate into that we should create our own “internet” for every customer that wants to hit our site, just so we can guarantee that the ones building the current infrastructure won’t be paid off by our competitors to slow traffic going to us.

It’s a darn good thing that American Idol built their own Phone System before all of those millions and millions of people used up the precious resources that the phone companies worked hard to put down. Imagine if they would have used the public phone system! It would have been chaos!

(Quotes from From Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) via Wired)