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Does the Internet Need a Major Capacity Upgrade?
wiggles writes "According to the Chicago Tribune, the recent surge of video sites such as Youtube and Google video are pushing the limits of the Internet's bandwidth, or soon will be. Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, says that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands. Further, a recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Admittedly, this seems a bit sensationalist, but are we headed for a massive slowdown of the whole internet?"
I was going to reply to you point by point until I read your last line:
If we need any major internet change, it's nationalizing it. I don't see what's wrong with it right now other than some people crying they will not make enough money (like all companies), people stating that somehow it is making it hard for new companies to be started or people saying that there is a big dark technical problem looming over it waiting to kill us all. None of these are news.
Nationalizing it like the UK's health care, where they recently discovered that doctors were letting old people die rather than get treated because the doctors did better financially treating younger, healthier patients? No thanks. Nationalizing it like South American dictators are taking over their oil industries and watching the prices skyrockets? No thanks. Nationalizing it like the US did with education, quickly watching it spiral to one of the worst in the first world? How about nationalizing it like social security -- we had great private health care and private retirement programs until social security and the HMO Act of 73 quickly made it all federal. Let's nationalize, that's the solution!
People who want to make money do so because the save other people money and frustration. Profit only shows one thing: that you're doing for someone else something that they can't do as cheaply/quickly themselves. Profit is good, it allows for further investment. Nationalizing would destroy it.