Series of tubes

"A series of tubes" is a phrase used originally as an analogy by then-United States Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to describe the Internet in the context of opposing net neutrality.

The amendment would have prohibited Internet service 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 was widely ridiculed, because Stevens was perceived to have displayed an extremely limited understanding of the Internet, despite his leading the Senate committee responsible for regulating it.

[4]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.

[12] Edward Felten, Princeton University professor of computer science, pointed out the unfairness of some criticisms of Stevens's wording, while maintaining that the underlying arguments were rather weak.

[22] Before December 6, 2022,[23] the documentation for developing Chrome extensions included a near-verbatim quote of the "series of tubes" paragraph when describing its chrome.storage class.

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.