Was Ted Stevens right after all?
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.
Ted Stevens was right! Of the three metaphors proferred here, and for the discussion being had on “Net Neutrality”, the “series of tubes” line is the best concept to understand the form and function of what is at stake. It is incumbent for anyone who mocked Ted Stevens’s words to state their better easy-to-understand byte-sized metaphor.
Actually, while I can see how the Internet might be something you just dump things onto, I am not sure what to make of the “Big Truck”. I guess it is part of the same concept — Ted Stevens has both the dumping and the dumped in mind, the truck dumping things onto the thing that is being dumped on. But everybody knows that the Internet is indeed something people take dumps onto. And, those dumps fall into series of tubes. It is incumbent on us all to keep the series of tubes unclogged.
We are still having to guage these things in regulating television, years and years after President Roosevelt took the television airwaves to tamp down the fears of the public at the outset of the Great Depression.