Douglas Alexander: “sometimes when we talk about this Internet tax proposal, eyes glaze over. It is a hard subject for people to get into…”

“sometimes when we talk about this Internet tax proposal, eyes glaze over. It is a hard subject for people to get into their brain because we are talking about a new way of doing things. We are talking about Internet access, how one connects their computer, for example, to the Internet, but we are especially, in this case, talking about high-speed Internet access. High-speed Internet access has been known to us just for the last few years. When Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it is possible that nobody in Congress had ever heard of high-speed Internet access. The commercial Internet was just a few years old at that time. High-speed Internet access is another one of America's great adventures. The Industrial Revolution was caused by the internal combustion engine. That was a great invention. The telephone was a great invention. Television was a great invention. The use of high-speed Internet access is a great discovery. What is possible with it is that suddenly a lot of the everyday services of life, such as making telephone calls as an example, downloading movies, even watching our regular television channels, may be done through the Internet.”