I figured it would be the government that eventually kills the Internet. I keep my hopes up, especially with the current war on WikiLeaks, but I really think that what will kill the Internet will be Netflix.

My original fear was that someday, the government would decide that the Internet, like the radio spectrum, was public property and therefore must be regulated. Bandwidth would be assigned and licensed.

There would be a narrow chunk of the spectrum reserved for the public, similar to Citizens’ Band radio. It would be slow and limited.

The high-speed Internet would effectively be owned by the major media companies. They would provide fast service to their own special places, plus auction off bandwidth to the big names who could pay for it. The rest of the Internet would then become a dark back room, basically useless.

That nightmare may come to pass with Net Neutrality laws. It’s being accelerated with the alarming reaction to the WikiLeaks episode.

WikiLeaks, in case you didn’t know, is a web site where government and big business whistleblowers can share confidential information. Some of the information is sensitive, but most of it is merely embarrassing. I’m a big fan of openness and transparency in government, so I’ve been a WikiLeaks fan.

The current persecution of WikiLeaks, and its founder Julian Assange, is misdirected. Assange is merely the messenger, but he makes a convenient target. The entire episode may in fact accelerate the on-coming regulation of the Internet.

Then again, it might be Netflix that kills the Internet.

Netflix allows streaming movies to be downloaded to your computer so that you can watch them anytime. That feature is insanely popular, but it has the potential to bring the Internet to its knees.

Imagine how slow the Internet will be when everyone on your block is watching a streaming movie on the Internet? The download speed will crawl. Movies will pause, but for the non-movie-watching user, web pages will take an eternity to load. Heck, people may give up being online and actually start reading again!

Eventually the government will have to come in and regulate things, right? They won’t bother trying to increase bandwidth, as has been done in other countries. Nope, it’s easier to slap on rules and regulations — especially given the “loose” flow of information as demonstrated by WikiLeaks.

I don’t see how this can end well, therefore I hope that I’m dead wrong. Time will tell.