What is the Internet?
Posted on | July 14, 2006
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee–charged with regulating, among other things, the Internet–on the Internet: “It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.” Striving ever on toward coot-hood, the Senator continued:
“I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially…”
Watch The Daily Show let the air out of the senator.
Anyone who cares can bone up on the SMTP transfer process via the currently-excellent Wikipedia article on e-mail. Long story short: if your receipt of a given e-mail is delayed for hours or even minutes, it isn’t because the Internet “tubes” between the sender and recipient are clogged with commercial traffic–the actual packet delivery between ISPs takes place in milliseconds, or not at all. The likely causes for hours or days of delay include a confusion over DNS records, an ISP’s standard delay for resending after a failed delivery, and administrative delays in the recipient’s network (to say nothing of an elderly senator’s busy schedule/naptime which prevents his checking his own e-mail). Don’t blame Amazon shoppers!
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