The prediction, in brief:

You’ve read that the Internet was designed to survive the thermonuclear war, but it’s repeatedly been brought to its knees, its circuits choked, for example, by the reaction to one measly jury verdict in Los Angeles [the O.J. Simpson trial]. The Internet is intermittently overloaded, and the TCP/IP architecture doesn’t deal well with overloads. Furthermore, the Internet’s naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won’t be, so no problem.

Predictor: Metcalfe, Robert

Prediction, in context:

In a classic 1995 article he wrote for InfoWorld, Internet pioneer Robert Metcalfe, the man behind Ethernet, enumerated his reasons “the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” He lists 11 reasons for his prediction, including this one:”Capacity: You’ve read that the Internet was designed to survive the thermonuclear war, but it’s repeatedly been brought to its knees, its circuits choked, for example, by the reaction to one measly jury verdict in Los Angeles [the O.J. Simpson trial]. The Internet is intermittently overloaded, and the TCP/IP architecture doesn’t deal well with overloads. Furthermore, the Internet’s naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won’t be, so no problem.”

Date of prediction: December 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Bandwidth

Name of publication: InfoWorld

Title, headline, chapter name: From the Ether: Predicting the Internet’s Catastrophic Collapse and Ghost Sites Galore in 1996

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/metcalfe/bm120495.htm

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Pinkerton, Bradley Steven