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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

In the context of the speaker's insane quote, in which he blamed streaming video for a 4-day delay of his personal emails, it doesn't make much sense. Also it's a rhetorical fallacy to suggest that because a thing is not another thing, then it must be a third thing. Really, the Internet is neither a truck nor a series of tubes.

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Right. He's making an analogy about how things wait in line, and he's talking about for significant amounts of time, not fractions of a second. That's not how the internet works at all. Competing data flows slow down a bit but all run simultaneously.

We don't even have to get into the silly parts like "the people who are streaming through 10, 12 movies at a time or a whole book at a time"

Internet is a bidirectional graph with constrained bandwith (flow). Series of tubes is a perfectly fine analogy.

His thesis (about video streaming) was false, but his analogy was ok, people jumped on it for the wrong reasons (as it often happens in politics).

It's not hard to make an analogy work if you want to simplify the subject. Is a series of tubes a better analogy than trucks on a road network?

Ok, that's a good analogy too (packets being a thing).

"A series of tubes" was meant to be a contrast to the truck analogy.

"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."

The tube vs truck analogy doesn't really make much sense here. Tubes aren't exactly famous for having discrete items queue up within them.

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