By Paul Rickard12/24/96

Over the last year or so, a lot of internet 'experts' have predicted that the net will soon collapse. I don't believe there will be a total collapse, but think that there will be some big growing pains and probably a partial-shutdown. The reason for problems such as that is infastructure overload. In other words, the pre-existing telephone lines and equipment which carry the internet are overloaded and slow.
The biggest causes of that are overuse and content size. Microsoft's net venture, MSN, has caused an increase in users, and an incredible increase in content size. Since MSN began in fall 1995, MSN's millions of new users have clogged the already stressed internet. All of those users have been accessing MSN's bandwidth-eating content like movies, scrolling graphics and live broadcasts.
Another problem with the internet is the increasing number of complicated, graphic-intense web pages. Microsoft is introducing a lot of almost useless HTML tags in it's FrontPage and Internet Explorer programs to make those programs "better" than their competition. All the extra tags and the extra graphics supported by those tags cause even more net overload. The internet can withstand a nuclear attack, but can the internet survive Microsoft?