Well, congratulations, America! Your insatiable need to post Ron Paul testimonials and numerous parodies of the Clinton "3AM Phone Call" advertisement is putting the entire internet on the path toward a future apocalypse, in which only a few hundred bloggers will be able to tell the world about what an awesome time they're having at the South by Southwest Festival and newspapers, through no fault of their own, suddenly become profitable again.
As you might have suspected, this is all YouTube's fault:
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet's pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: "The End of the Internet?"
While the practical upshot doesn't include a "a lights-out Internet crash," there is worry about the road ahead: "'The Internet doesn't collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can't do online,' said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year." Hope remains that technological advancement will keep pace with growth.
It should be noted that an early bellwether of this looming crisis was reached toward the end of 2007, when the sheer number of political blogs finally exceeded the available body of political jargon for which they could be named.