Nemertes Still Pushing Exaflood Nonsense

[Commentary] Earlier this year, Nemertes Research reconstituted a 2008 report claiming the Internet was about to run out of bandwidth, and that looming brown outs would be hitting us any day now. The "Exaflood" myth, cooked up by the same think tank that brought you intelligent design, has been repeatedly debunked by network capacity experts, who note that the Internet's growth is actually quite manageable with only modest infrastructure upgrades. As we just got done exploring in a long post on network neutrality, telecom lobbyists concocted this pseudo-emergency as a political ploy. Carriers realize that the only way to retain the kind of power they're used to in the face of voice and content competition is to constrict the pipe. But with giant quarterly revenues and hardware and bandwidth prices dropping, it's hard to justify. Enter the Exaflood: the idea that if you don't give carriers whatever they'd like (less regulation, no net neutrality laws, no price controls, huge subsidies and tax credits, less consumer protection, metered billing) the Internet will grind to a halt and we'll all be crying over our clogged tubes. Are you scared yet?