Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the dysfunctions of healthcare.gov, the website on which uninsured Americans living in many states are supposed to buy health coverage. While problems with the site are very real, the hearing can mostly be described as "concern trolling," in which spectators that want a thing to fail or go away pretend to be concerned about such thing. The right's post-shutdown strategy is clearly painting the Affordable Care Act as a total disaster, mostly by repeatedly calling it a "total disaster."But the comment that really got under my skin, one that was repeated about three times on an NPR broadcast during a 10 minute drive, comes courtesy of a Democrat: Anna Eshoo, whose district includes Silicon Valley. Eshoo, who co-chairs the Congressional Internet Caucus, is not a "network of tubes"-level congressperson by any means. She's a supporter of net neutrality and she introduced the Broadband Conduit Deployment Act of 2009, which mandates that all new federally-funded roads have broadband infrastructure built underneath.So, it's a bummer to hear her say something as asinine as this: “There are thousands of websites that handle concurrent volumes far larger than what HealthCare.gov was faced with. Amazon and eBay don’t crash the week before Christmas, and ProFlowers doesn’t crash on Valentine’s Day.” For one, they do. Amazon and eBay outages happen kind of a lot, even at non-peak times. But there's also this: neither site began operations as massively popular, legally-mandated outlets; they didn't start cold in the midst of a hype storm right before the holiday season.People say stupid things in the House of Representative at a superhuman rate. So what? For one, NPR didn't seem very interested in questioning a statement so obviously needing questioning and, second, this came from one of the few "internet people" in the United State's Congress. Bleh.
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