A Series of Tubes

I admit, I'm a little late to this, but there's a debate going on in the Senate Commerce Committee regarding "basic net neutrality provisions into a moving telecommunications bill. The provisions didn't prohibit an ISP from handling VOIP faster than emails, but would have made it illegal to handle its own VOIP packets faster than a competitor's." Complicated, but regardless, the real gem is how Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) describes the internet.

"...I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

[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 its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

Wow.

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