A Series of Tubes

There is a running joke on the Internet in certain nerdy (in a good way) sites about the Internet being a series of tubes. Some of you may know about this, some may not. This joke was inspired in the words of Senator Ted Stevens when discussing an amendment that would have prohibited ISPs from charging fees to give some companies higher priority access to their networks. His words are just ludicrous and are really something to remember.

“Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's 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”

Even more thought-provoking is the fact that people like Senator Stevens take decisions about technological issues when they are clearly not capable of doing so. Decisions regarding the Internet may have an impact on the whole world, not just the US. And the rest of the world can’t do anything about it.