Some of us will remember how Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and in charge of regulating the Internet, demonstrated his grasp of the technology: It’s not like a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. Now he’s defending himself:
“I have a letter from a big scientist who said I was absolutely right in using the word ‘tubes,”‘ he told reporters.
I wonder how big that scientist was? 300 lbs maybe? He’d have to be pretty big to cover for Stevens’s ignorance.
I thought Stevens was hilarious, but – and maybe this is my own ignorance – I thought it wasn’t too bad as an analogy. I don’t know about a “series” of tubes, rather a network of tubes, many running in parallel. Of course, his prime objective was to let Ma Bell decide which packets move & which ones sit, so they can charge more for moving them… which is a stupid idea. But, really one can do worse than the tubes analogy… tubes with a bunch of dump trucks driving through them, maybe.
To be honest rather than snarky, I think it’s not too bad an analogy either; we sometimes talk about information being pipelined, etc., so it’s not a priori ridiculous. But to introduce the tubes analogy as a better one that a truck analogy, I think, shows a basic lack of understanding. He’d have been better off saying it’s like telephone lines with everyone talking to everyone all the time.