It's not a truck, it's a series of tubes

one US senator's enlightening explanation of the internet, from Wired magazine:

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.
......They (commercial organisations) 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 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 its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.

What it does show is people find it really hard to visualise the vast infrastructural network that is the internet; it is somehow intangible spatially. Which ineviatbly leads to a lot of misundertanding of how it works and what you can do with it...