Critics Blast Claims of Net Outages by 2010

Ominous warnings earlier this week of a looming Internet disaster are highly misleading, suggest critics. "As we've stated previously, most warnings of capacity armageddon come from traffic shaping companies looking to sell hardware," the industry web site Broadband Reports writes about a recent Nemertes Research study, which was funded in part by the Internet Innovation Alliance.

The IIA's membership includes AT&T, Level3, and Nortel, network vendors who are collectively lobbying national governments for subsidies, Broadband Reports notes. Techdirt also weighs in, writing that, "For well over a decade now, someone will come along every few months or so and claim that the Internet is about to be overwhelmed by traffic and will collapse ... however, these predictions never seem to come true." (More broadband Internet stories.)