I think both assertions are wrong: Regulators still have no real conception of how any of this technology works, and you can watch the congressional hearings with Facebook for evidence that mostly they didn't really have a clue what to do once they had him in the room, or how exactly Facebook even makes money.

The court system only confirmed your rights to use webcrawlers within the last year, and webcrawlers have been around since the start of Google.

And as for the series of tubes guy, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He clearly still didn't have a good grasp on the subject, but I don't think he was being literal.