Series of tubes

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Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who referred to the Internet as "a series of tubes"

"Series of tubes" is an analogy used by United States Senator Ted Stevens (born November 18, 1923) (Republican-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of network neutrality.^[1] On June 28, 2006, he used this metaphor to criticize a proposed amendment to a committee bill. The amendment would have prohibited Internet service providers from charging fees to give some companies higher priority access to their networks or their customers. This metaphor (along with several other odd choices of words) was widely ridiculed as demonstrating Stevens' poor understanding of the Internet.

1 Partial text of Stevens' comments
2 Effect on net neutrality discourse
3 Publicity
- 3.1 Pop culture references
4 Technical analysis
5 Media
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Partial text of Stevens' comments

“

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 [Tuesday]. 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.^[2]

”

[edit] Effect on net neutrality discourse

According to The Wall Street Journal, as summarized by MediaPost commentator Ross Fadner:^[3]

“

"The Internet is a Series of Tubes!" spawned a new slogan that became a rallying cry for Net neutrality advocates. ... Stevens' overly simplistic description of the Web's infrastructure made it easy for pro-neutrality activists to label the other side as old and out-of-touch.

”

[edit] Publicity

On June 28, 2006, Public Knowledge government affairs manager Alex Curtis wrote a brief blog entry introducing the senator's speech and posted an MP3 recording.^[4] The next day, the Wired magazine blog 27B Stroke 6 featured a much longer post^[2] by Ryan Singel, which included Singel's transcriptions of some parts of Stevens' speech considered the most humorous. Within days, thousands of other blogs and message boards, including BoingBoing,^[5] Slashdot,^[6] Fark,^[7] DailyKos^[8] and others^[9] posted the story. Most writers and commentators derisively cited several of Stevens' misunderstandings of Internet technology, arguing that the speech showed that he had formed a strong opinion on a topic which he understood poorly (e.g., referring to an e-mail message as "an Internet" and blaming bandwidth issues for an e-mail problem much more likely to be caused by mail server or routing issues). The story sparked mainstream media attention, including a mention in the New York Times.^[10] The technology podcast This Week in Tech discussed the incident in Episode 60.^[11]

[edit] Pop culture references

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has made multiple references to Steven's "series of tubes" description;^[12]^[13]^[14]^[15] as a result, Stevens has become well known as the person who once headed the committee charged with regulating the Internet.

Stevens's statement was remixed into a techno song, "Series of Tubes (Net Neutrality Dance Mix)" by Manish, which was widely distributed online^[16] and featured on YTMND.

In the keynote speech at the 2007 Penny Arcade Expo, Wil Wheaton spoke about remembering when the internet was more like a truck than a series of tubes.^[17]

The University of Calgary's student newspaper, The Gauntlet, features a semi-regular column about the Internet called "A Series of Tubes".^[18]

In the video game Gears of War there is an achievement titled 'A Series of Tubes' which is unlocked by playing the game multiplayer over the internet.

In the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, one of the radio station talk shows mentions the "series of tubes" analogy.

[edit] Technical analysis

The Windows Network and Internet icon employs the 'tube' metaphor

Stevens' speech was analyzed by Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who said that he disagreed with Stevens' argument but felt that the language "series of tubes" was entirely reasonable as a non-technical explanation given off-the-cuff in a meeting.^[19]

The term pipe is a commonly used idiom to refer to a data connection, with pipe diameter being analogous to bandwidth or throughput.^[20] 10BASE-5 coaxial cables for Original Ethernet are also known as "orange hoses" or "garden hoses".

Routers use a data structure called a queue to buffer packets.^[21] When packets arrive more quickly than can be forwarded, the router will hold the packets in a queue until they can be sent on to the next router or be dropped.^[22] On links that become congested, packets typically spend more time waiting in the queue than they do actually moving down wires or optical fiber. It is the delay of packets in the queue that causes the latency problems that can make certain types of services impossible to use.^[23] Email, the example that Stevens used by saying that an email had taken days to deliver, is not affected by this kind of sub-second latency.