Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Chief Technologist, Center for Democracy & Technology – “Over the past five months, I had the privilege of co-editing – with Time Warner Cable’s Jason Weil – a report on Internet interconnection by the Broadband Internet Technology Advisory Group (BITAG) that we released this past weekend. BITAG’s technical working group (a multistakeholder collection of technologists) authored the report, aiming to provide an accessible introduction into how networks connect themselves together on the Internet to make “a network of networks.” Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens caught some flak within the last decade for calling the Internet a series of tubes. While that may not be the most accurate portrayal of what the Internet is from a technical perspective, it’s not far from the truth at a higher, abstract level. It’s especially apt for Internet freedom advocates like CDT, which work to insure that traffic in the tubes of the Internet is treated equally, just as water working its way through a city’s plumbing is not routed selectively at the atomic level. Tubes necessarily need plumbers and plumbing to keep things running, but what does the plumbing of the Internet look like? How does it work? While I’ll try to give you some flavor for this here, our report serves as a crash course in Internet networking (for poets, so to speak!).”