Received news of two stories about the impending death of the internet:

Storm clouds looming for Internet, experts say

Internet Gridlock to Occur in Just Two Years

Are these stories accurate?  Perhaps not today, but soon they will be!  The internet is a finite resource in many ways, and if the net population keeps on growing net resources are going to run out.  Because of the increasing dependence of the global economy on e-commerce, I do not think that governments will allow a collapse, but it is interesting to think about how they will handle the problem.

In many developing countries the citizenry have much less access to the internet than in developed countries; will the former draw the shortest straw when it comes to divvying up the internet resources, or will they not be impacted much because their economies do not depend on it much?  Even in South Africa, one of economic leaders of Africa, the internet access is expensive and slow.

Perhaps, the solution will be to split the internet into several parts.  Not easy, but not impossible either.  There could be an academic net, a commerce web, government web, entertainment web, etc.  Perhaps “inter-internet gateways”.  Of course, this is only a temporary fix and does not address the core problem, but it is one way to salvage more “useful” parts of the net.  In fact, this solution has been implemented with Internet2, but I have no idea how well it is working and how it compares to the regular internet.