"Series of Tubes" wikipedia worthy

Adam Kinney — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:33:00 GMT

I know this happened back in June and was covered everywhere, but I was just reading someone giving a metaphor for the Internet and this one will always be stuck in my head:

Series of tubes was a metaphor used by United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), to describe the Internet in a June 28, 2006 speech about network neutrality. Stevens was criticizing a proposed amendment to a bill in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation which would have prohibited ISPs from charging fees to give some companies higher priority access to the internet.

And that block of text is quoted from the wikipedia page just for the meme Series of Tubes. How lucky we are where the pros and cons of our current culture are tracked in the monster reference site known as the Wikipedia. We've been thinking of doing a piece on 10 covering Flickr spelinking. We need to add Wikipedia digging to the list.

I'll leave with a few choice words from Senator Stevens:

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

It's a series of tubes.

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'government'

"Series of Tubes" wikipedia worthy