A Series of Tubes: Infrastructure, Broadband, and Baseline Content Control

February 12

The late Senator Ted Stevens famously said in a 2006 committee meeting that the “Internet is not something that you just dump something on; it’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” While he was ridiculed widely at the time, Senator Stevens’s remarks actually reveal an interesting hortatory description of what the Internet should be (though given the rest of his comments, apparently not one that he intended). What Stevens’s metaphor suggests is that the physical conduits of the Internet should act like nothing more than non-judgmental conduits of the rest of the world’s traffic. We will see this week, however, that this is not a true reflection of how the tubes work. The big questions for this week: What are the “tubes” of the Internet? Should the tubes have a role in controlling the throughput content? What is the role of government when it comes to developing and regulating our Internet-tubes?

Readings

• Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, Internet Filtering, The Politics and Mechanisms of Control (from Access Denied)

• Dawn Nunziato, Virtual Freedom (Ch. 1) (pending)

• Yochai Benkler, Next Generation Connectivity (executive summary and introduction)

• Susan Crawford, Wired, We Can’t All Be Google’s Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth Race (Wired)

• Adam Thierer, More Confusion about Internet “Freedom” (Tech Liberation)

Optional Readings

• Sam Biddle, How to Destroy the Internet (Gizmodo)

• Orin Kerr, The Problem of Perspective in Internet Law (Focus on sections I and II)

• Dawn Nunziato, Virtual Freedom (Ch. 7) (pending)

• Ed Felten, Taking Ted Stevens Seriously

Class Discussion

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