BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7370956.stm

The Internet faces a couple of significant hurdles as technology and its popularity sprint towards the future: the first is the amount of traffic across it, which has exploded in recent years; the second is the omnipresent debate about network neutrality. The two issues are intricately related, but both demand a solution, and soon.

Depending on to whom you talk (cue Orwell’s rolling in his grave), the Internet may or may not be about to buckle under its own swollen girth: companies like AT&T and Sprint, who provide most of the Internet’s major infrastructure, claim that their resources will be overwhelmed by a wave of streaming video and file-sharing, pushing Internet usage to hitherto unimaginable heights. This collapse could come within as few as three years. Cisco insists that traffic will only increase at a rate of 50% to 60%– manageable under the current rate of infrastructure improvement.

The other facet of the debate concerns network neutrality, the principle that ISP’s not discriminate against traffic based on content. Providers argue that the cost of infrastructure now outweighs their user fees, and that they should be able to charge users for access to certain services. Streaming video is a prime example—it consumes a tremendous amount of bandwidth, slowing down performance for a large portion of the network. In forming an opinion on the subject, the average user must weigh their unwillingness to pay for a service that really ought to be free, and maintaining an acceptable level of performance

                In terms of network traffic, the effects are most noticeable locally (though this is a result of the ISP’s distribution system more than anything else). If the information flood becomes truly excessive, however, it’s possible that the entire network might become overloaded.