Senator Stevens, June 28, 2006:

The Internet is a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

When I think about it, I don’t think the analogy is really all that bad. Yeah, the funny is on him, but I think for a guy his age, who did not grow up in a networked society, a “series of tubes” does adequately describe how the Internet works. I mean, we use phrases like “travel the information super highway”, “spider / crawl a web site”, or “surf the web” to describe things we do with the Internet, even though we don’t literally do those things. The word “pipe” is also pretty common in the world of computers, and network engineers often refer to network connections as some sort of pipe. And it certainly is possible to overload and saturate a network such that nothing gets through. So basically, I don’t think it was too ridiculous for the Senator to use “a series of tubes” as a way to describe how the Internet functions. However, what I do think was ridiculous was everything he said before and after that analogy, with regards to Net Neutrality.

We certainly are reaching a point now where bandwidth is plentiful enough that all sorts of interesting things can be done, and online video is probably the best example of something that uses a lot of bandwidth. Here’s an article I wrote about YouTube for my company, about how they’re using big, fast, and distributed networks to become one of the most popular web sites out there. Opponents to Net Neutrality (like ISPs) threaten these new and interesting bandwidth intensive web sites by basically giving preferential treatment to sites that pay more money. However, as you’ll note in the article I mentioned, YouTube already spends over $1 million per month to basically get “preferential treatment” (ie, a bigger tube on the Internet). Hmm, something’s not quite right with this picture… Here’s a site which explains in much better words what this fuss is all about.

The point of this post? Not really sure, but I think we’re gonna need bigger tubes…