The Internet could come down with bird flu
In the event of a bird flu pandemic, it is very likely that government agencies and corporations would shutter their offices to prevent additional infection and require everyone to work from home. Unfortunately, the Internet isn’t quite able to support this. Millions of additional people trying to work from home would result in gridlock on the “Information Superhighway”. The Internet is only really built for the current traffic patterns, and couldn’t handle the large amount of additional bandwidth.
Just ignoring the people working from home, everyone else would probably limit their exposure to the outside world on concern for their own safety. And what exactly are these people supposed to be doing in their houses for days on end? Using the Internet would be a large part. It just can’t handle it, unfortunately. There’s talk of the government stepping in and using packet-shaping at the national level, cutting out non-essential high-bandwidth services like YouTube, the P2P networks, and BitTorrent. Usually I’m not in favor of government “censorship”, but in the event of an emergency, and if the alternative is an utterly non-functioning net, I can’t really say I’d object.
