Imminent Death of the Internet Predicted (by net neutrality opponents)

Net neutrality opponents have apparently gotten up to predicting that net neutrality will cause the Internet to melt down due to traffic overload; for example, here's an article in Forbes.

Someone has taken the time to research these claims, and finds them hollow:

Why the surge of sky-is-falling rhetoric in the early months of 2007? Three possible explanations include misapplication of anecdotal evidence, the conflation of long-term and short-term views, and political gamesmanship.

— The Future of the Internet: Scare Stories, CIO Insight, By Edward Cone, April 4, 2007

Anyone who's been on the Internet for a while has seen Imminent Death stories over and over, since about 1974, that is, back in the ARPANET days before the Internet proper even existed. Various opponents of Internet technology or deployment seize on the glitch of the moment and build that molehill into a mountain.

In this case, Cone has looked into what's actually happening:

But perception is ahead of reality. So far—at least when it comes to Web traffic—there is less than meets the eye to the YouTube revolution. Streaming video, expected to drive huge traffic growth in the future, accounts for just 2 percent of traffic.

No doubt in the future it will, when there are fast enough broadband speeds that people use it more. This is already true in many countries, such as Japan, Korea, and even Serbia. But not the U.S., which pokes along at end-user speeds a tenth of those available elsewhere.

All this takes me back to 1984, the year the web started to take off. Mosaic, the first popular web browser, opened four TCP connections at once! This was clearly hostile misuse of the Internet that would cause all sorts of congestion problems! Or so claimed opponents of the web. Actually, such use led to deployment of more bandwidth and rapid accumulation of more Internet users.

If we had real fast broadband, we might see the same thing happen again. That's not likely to happen with the current telco and cableco duopoly, unless we get net neutrality, more competition, or both.

-jsq