The mass media are spreading a variety of stories about the Internet’s inability to carry traffic in as little as two years. I’m not an investigative journalist but I wonder if this is a concerted FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign to put pressure on governments and regulators to allow the telecommunications oligopoly to more freely implement packet shaping. First tell everyone that there is no more capacity and then say that it’s the fault of all those youngsters using peer2peer file sharing and voice over IP, two areas where the telco’s aren’t making any money.
For example: Financial Post; ABC News; The Star.
It just seems to me that the Internet’s inherent structure is flexible enough to route around capacity issues and allow for innovative solutions to speed traffic without imposing a system reminiscent of Ma Bell’s telephone monopoly. Personally, I would put more faith in a loose bunch of researchers, coders and hackers (Ã la open source) to solve any capacity problems that may arise in the near future.
Nasty things happen when networks become saturated. Maybe the killer app for the Internet will be a rapidly deployable underlying carrier infrastructure.
A more fundamental problem seems to me to be what I call “Internet Pollution”. There is a huge amount of junk out there with almost no mechanisms to weed out the junk. Maybe we need a “Best Before ” compulsory metadata field.
So far researchers, coders and hackers seem to ignore the polution problem. We treat the Internet like we treated the Oceans.