A new report from Deloitte claims the internet will slow down to a crawl this year (we’re talking I-25 or the M25 speed) due to the rather large explosion of videos and streaming media from the likes of YouTube, GoogleVideo and EngineeringTV.   With the StarWars Kid and Paris Hilton doing their very best to encourage every man and his dog to download 4 minutes of entertainment - much to the annoyance of Fox, Viacom and NBC - (whose numbers are going down like a cheap hooker) it looks like we’ll see the end of the internet long before the icebergs melt, the rain forrest disappear or we find Bin Laden.  I digress, here’s the scoop from the incredibly clever chaps at Deloitte… 

‘The twin trends causing this are an explosion in demand, largely fuelled by the growth in video traffic and the lack of investment in new, functioning capacity,’ said Igal Brightman, global managing partner at Deloitte. ‘Bottlenecks are likely to become apparent in some of the Internet’s backbones, the terabit-capable pipes exchanging traffic between continents.’  ‘The impact may be most noticeable in the form of falling quality of service,’ he said. ‘Surfers are most likely to be annoyed by the slowdown in service. And it may only take an unexpected upsurge in video usage to turn the inconvenience caused by a drop in access speeds into full-scale consumer dissatisfaction.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s Paris Hilton. Blurgh. It took me forever to find a shot of her with her clothes on…