It isn’t terrorists or porn that will bring the Internet to its knees, says Google, but rather the ever-present, ever-lurking, ever-evil of Web TV. The company — who recently acquired video giant YouTube — says the Internet wasn’t designed for TV and that the increasing need for space that is expected to broadcast high-quality video over the Internet is far greater than Google can handle.

Sleepy cats like this are destroying the Internet.

"The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," says Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology.

Cable executives met the news with applause, celebration and binge-drinking as the rising popularity of Web TV gave them worse nightmares than the inevitable fall of reality television.

But we wouldn’t celebrate just yet.

Sure, 60% of the Internet’s traffic is because of peer-to-peer downloads/uploads and film and TV swapping — but, unless you want to heavily restrict the way the Internet works, it’s going to keep happening no matter what Google or the cable companies want.

The fact of the matter is that Web TV is the way of the future — not only for cable companies but for independent filmmakers and artists. What the Internet did for music the Internet is doing to film, and the ever-growing popularity of watching all kinds of video, be it a cat in a jar or a full episode of CSI, is not going to be stopped by a little thing like Google being unable to scale.

They’ll learn to scale. They’ll adapt — the Internet is an ever-growing, ever-morphing, almost-living thing that goes the way the users want it to go. Right now, video is the new porn, and companies will figure out a way to handle it — or be run out of business trying.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Everything Else, Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.