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"A series of tubes" is a phrase coined originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing network neutrality. On June 28, 2006, he used this metaphor to criticize a proposed amendment to a committee bill. The amendment would have prohibited Internet Access providers such as AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications from charging fees to give some companies' data a higher priority in relation to other traffic. The metaphor has been widely ridiculed, particularly because Stevens displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, even though he was in charge of regulating it. Edward Felten, Princeton University professor of computer science, pointed out the unfairness of some criticisms of Stevens' wording, while maintaining that the underlying arguments were rather weak.
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Media commentary
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. The next day, the Wired magazine blog 27B Stroke 6 featured a lengthier post 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 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. The technology podcast This Week in Tech discussed the incident.
According to The Wall Street Journal, as summarized by MediaPost commentator Ross Fadner:
Related nomenclature
The term pipe is a commonly used idiom to refer to a data connection, with pipe diameter being analogous to bandwidth or throughput. For instance, high-bandwidth connections are often referred to as "fat pipes".
Tribute
Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post wrote a humorous article entitled "Sen. Stevens, the tubes salute you" after Stevens died in an airplane crash August 9, 2010:
And as people remember him, make ill-timed jests, and muse on his legacy—all in real time, in great profusion—I worry that they are disrupting the ability of people elsewhere to receive their Internets. But for us in the Facebook generation who weren't around for the first plane crash and know the Bridge to Nowhere primarily as an SNL punchline, the senator's legacy is in that series of tubes.
The "Bridge to Nowhere" refers to the Gravina Island Bridge, another issue Stevens was responsible for, for which he was also mocked.