There is a series-of-tubes metaphor that makes sense, but not his. >And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put

There is a series-of-tubes metaphor that makes sense, but not his. >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. He thinks the Internet is like a pneumatic tube, where too much usage means people are entirely cut off for a time. In truth it's like a water pipe. Too much usage results in reduced throughput to each user, but no one is even temporarily cut off. Networks avoid queues. A well-designed network will handle email with no perceptible slowdown even under extreme congestion. The Senator's metaphor predicts that email will regularly take days to arrive because of congestion. The standard pipe analogy predicts this will almost never happen. But really, the Internet is like a global packet-switched network of networks. We deserve politicians who can handle the truth.