The Internet likes to spoof on politicians who make digital faux pas, such as former Vice President Al “I invented the Internet” Gore and Internets-loving former President George W. Bush.

And former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was tragically killed in a small airplane accident Monday, was no exception, never able to shake a speech in which he called the Web a “series of tubes.”

Said Stevens at a hearing in Congress in 2006:

“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 death of the hard-charging 86-year-old Republican pol, of course, revived the many online videos of him related to this non-geek malapropism, and “series of tubes” made it as a trending topic on Twitter.

Here is one of the more famous videos from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” and another rap based on Stevens’ speech:

In remarks at the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T (T), said the Internet will hit its capacity in 2010. “The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” Cicconi said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today. We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010.”

Clearly, some bigger tubes are in order here–$55 billion worth of them, according to Cicconi, who was quick to note that it will be companies like AT&T footing the bill for them. “There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet–it is no more ethereal than the highway system,” he said. “It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors.”

Ah yes, private investors. Like the ones who promised in the mid-1990s to provide fiber-optic connections to millions of households across the country in exchange for some $200 billion in tax cuts? The ones who never delivered on that promise, content to pocket direct tax credits of, on average, $2,000 per subscriber, without fulfilling their end of the bargain? Those investors?

In remarks at the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T (T), said the Internet will hit its capacity in 2010. “The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” Cicconi said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today. We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010.”

Clearly, some bigger tubes are in order here–$55 billion worth of them, according to Cicconi, who was quick to note that it will be companies like AT&T footing the bill for them. “There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet–it is no more ethereal than the highway system,” he said. “It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors.”

Ah yes, private investors. Like the ones who promised in the mid-1990s to provide fiber-optic connections to millions of households across the country in exchange for some $200 billion in tax cuts? The ones who never delivered on that promise, content to pocket direct tax credits of, on average, $2,000 per subscriber, without fulfilling their end of the bargain? Those investors?

“While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child’s online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be foolproof in keeping kids away from adult material,” Inouye said. “In that context, we must evaluate our current efforts to combat child pornography and consider what further measures may be needed to stop the spread of such illegal material over high-speed broadband connections.”

“Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether,” Stevens said. “The headlines continue to tell us of children who are victimized online. While the issues are difficult, I believe Congress has an important role to play to ensure that the protections available in other parts of our society find their way to the Internet.”

“While filtering and monitoring technologies help parents to screen out offensive content and to monitor their child’s online activities, the use of these technologies is far from universal and may not be foolproof in keeping kids away from adult material,” Inouye said. “In that context, we must evaluate our current efforts to combat child pornography and consider what further measures may be needed to stop the spread of such illegal material over high-speed broadband connections.”

“Given the increasingly important role of the Internet in education and commerce, it differs from other media like TV and cable because parents cannot prevent their children from using the Internet altogether,” Stevens said. “The headlines continue to tell us of children who are victimized online. While the issues are difficult, I believe Congress has an important role to play to ensure that the protections available in other parts of our society find their way to the Internet.”

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.

“… the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a 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.”

This year, it’s motorcycles and wirelines. From the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on number portability yesterday:

Stevens: Let me be just the devil’s advocate here. Could I just decide I want to keep my wireline and I want to add wireless to it? Can I have two providers on the same number?
Answer: … um, I don’t think that technology exists right now.
Stevens: If I had an IP phone, by definition, I’d have to leave the wire… wireline phone to use it?
Answer: I think that is the case with the technology today.
Stevens: Is it coming? Why shouldn’t I be able to say, just by a little switch on my phone at home that’s wired, I’m going off on the wireless now, I want to use this as I ride my motorcycle. … I’m bad. Pardon me.

See what I mean? Comedy gold. Give him a few props and he’d be giving Gallagher a run for his money …

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something 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.”

– U.S. Senator and former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

Maybe Ted Stevens was right. Maybe the Internet really is a series of tubes in desperate need of a retrofit. Maybe the time has come to rethink its underlying architecture. Certainly that’s the impression one is left with after reading through this whitepaper put forth by the Clean Slate Design for the Internet project. ” … Our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its shortcomings,” the whitepaper’s authors write. ” … We don’t believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable. … We believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and “backward-compatible” style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized
by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?” and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?”

Beats me. But if you’re going to go rebuilding the Internet, don’t forget Fred Brooks’s warning about “second-system effect”: “When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one’s success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity.”