A new book by Wired writer Andrew Blum has redeemed the late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens's infamous description of the Internet as "a series of tubes."
"Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet" explores the physical infrastructure of the web, from the fiber-optic cables connecting Europe and Africa, to Facebook's enormous data centers.
Stevens's remarks on the inner-workings of the Internet were largely criticized. However, he may not have been so far off the mark.
Andrew Blum recently told Terry Gross of Fresh Air that Stevens is "not wrong. The Internet is absolutely made of tubes. What else could it be made of?" He added:
It's many other things -- these protocols and languages and machines and a whole set of fantastically complex layers and layers of computing power that feeds the Internet every day. But if you think of the world in physical terms, and you're trying to be as reductive as possible and try to understand what this is, there's no way around it -- these are tubes.