The internet is certainly more tubes than clouds. The truth is that “tubes” is probably a more accurate description of the internet - of its physical nature, anyway - than most of the metaphors discussed here. “It’s a series of tubes.” Stevens was widely mocked, but he wasn’t wrong. Ted Stevens in a fumbling attack on net neutrality. A series of tubes - 2006: “The internet is not a big truck,” said Sen.The fast-lane metaphor continues to be the primary way net neutrality is discussed, at least by those advocating for an open internet. “How would you feel if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special ‘rush-hour’ lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong,” Wu wrote in Slate. Fast lanes, slow lanes - 1997: Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality” in 2003, but in 2006, he used an extended highway metaphor to explain why it was good.“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” wrote John Perry Barlow in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” The media often treated it as a scary place, warning of cybercrime and cybersex, and depicting it as a landscape made of neon numbers. Cyberspace - 1996: Compared to the highway metaphor, cyberspace came to represent a more anarchic vision of the internet, an imagined virtual region separate from the physical world. ![]() Virtual villages, cafes, flea markets, and parks - 1993: Tech journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, likening the message board he was dialing into to a “virtual village.” Like other people trying to convey the communitarian aspects of the internet, he also likened the subcultures and groups to cafes, flea markets, Hyde Park, and other public gathering places.It also carried with it the assumption that it’s a public work and that activity on it could be regulated. The information superhighway, in contrast, had stronger commercial associations. The Information Superhighway - 1991: Popularized by Al Gore as he pushed to expand and improve the national networking infrastructure, at the time used primarily by researchers.Later, it would be crawled by “spiders,” though the spider metaphor never really caught on. The Web - 1990: Tim Berners-Lee decided to call his system of linked hypertext documents “The Worldwide Web” instead of the “Mine of Information” or the “Information Mesh,” which he also considered.
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