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-----It appears to be a hobby among high tech oracles to predict the ever imminent collapse of the Internet. We are poised on the brink of a global data blackout, when the old trusted Network will finally succumb to the twin plagues of exponentially growing demand (overpopulation) and overtaxed infrastructure (limited resources).

Reports of the death of the ‘Net have been greatly exaggerated.

Such prognostications are not new -- I have been hearing them for as long as I have been using the net, about 7 years. Back in those days, the concern was that if the trends continue, it will be virtually impossible to login to ftp servers, and that downloads will become excruciatingly slow. In '91, the threat was Gopher. Surely, now that it is so easy to browse remote files and download images, the boost in popularity will slow the net so much that everyone will be shut out. With every new technology, the predictions grew ever more dire. Surely, the World Wide Web will finally kill the net. Positively, the killer will be Pointcast and its fellow information pushers.

And yet, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the ‘Net have been greatly exaggerated.

The conflict between overpopulation and limited resources was first noted 150 years ago by Thomas Malthus. His entirely reasonable observation that human population has the propensity to increase exponentially, while its ability to exploit resources has historically been very linear, led him to an entirely reasonable prediction that in the very near future mass starvation will destabilize the social order. Though many disasters befell the Western world in the past 150 years, mass starvation has not been one of them. Malthusian fallacy was to underestimate advances in agriculture that greatly enhanced the yield of cultivated land. Some say that Malthus might still be right. However, historically, the optimists, i.e. those who know not to underestimate human ingenuity, have always proved right.

The culture of the net itself mitigates capacity overloads.

To be realistic, there are many dangers to the net's capacity: the exponentially growing user base (projected to grow exponentially for some time), the growing number of hosts, and the resulting growth in routing tables, that is the way for data packets to find their way on the web, as well as the growing size of the data packages being transmitted, whereas before a simple text page sufficed, now nothing less than a flashy image would do, and tomorrow - the video. However, the only people who experience blackouts are proprietary network (such as AOL) users. Internet has exceeded critical mass - it will not die, it cannot die. It has generated enough interest in itself that the users won't allow it to stop functioning. Of course, Malthusian predictions can't be prevented from occurring without the corresponding advances in technology. But even without reorchestrating infrastructure, much advance in perceived speed of information delivery has been achieved. Simple advances in browsers such as displaying text and images progressively and cashing pages. Putting fast servers on the other end of the request has also significantly sped up browsing. Improvements in H(yper) T(ext) T(ransfer) P(rotocol) promise to speed up transfer rates several times. The culture of the net itself mitigates capacity overloads. The most useful sites (shareware archives) often mirror themselves on other computers. Netizens are known to retaliate against the most egregious abuses, such as "spam" and mass junk e-mail. So you see, doomsayers have always been wrong and will continue to be wrong. Such a complex thing as the Internet is not easily killed.

kL