The end of the Net as we know it?

It's no secret that AOL counts among its 20 million customers a majority of Net newbies, and those who might not otherwise be as tech-savvy as they would like.

Call them Web unsophisticates, if you will -- although being one is certainly no crime.

Granted, a lot of AOL-heads just don't know any better. Once they do become enlightened, they quickly jettison the service and move on to better things -- namely, an ISP with a direct connection to the Internet.

Am I being too harsh?

Ignorance vs. stupidity
This past week, I received an e-mail from someone on AOL who got my e-mail address from my Web page, asking me if I had a Web page.

I found this funny enough to tell several people about it. About half of them asked if the person was an AOL user, and the others said, "Oh, well, that explains it," when I told them it was.

But there's a big difference between ignorance and stupidity -- and there's plenty of the latter circulating around the AOL community, too.

One look at all the malicious tools written for AOL troublemakers by AOL troublemakers will demonstrate this point.

They range from various password-stealing tools and schemes to get other AOL users' accounts, to ways to drop other users' connections, plus every flavor of denial of service attacks imaginable.

All this being said, all these people sitting there connected at 56Kbps (if they're extremely lucky) aren't causing enough mayhem on the Net to be catastrophic.

Traffic from 20 million people is a ton of traffic, but the Net can usually keep up on a normal day. And denial of service attacks launched from a 33.6Kbps isn't going to do too much real damage, either.

Dangers of a fast connection
But what happens when you give all these people a really fast connection to the Net? Will anarchy, destruction, and mass mayhem result?

After all, this is akin to a 16-year-old getting his or her first driver's license -- and being handed the keys to a Formula 1 racer.

Will we witness all the 12-year-old AOL wannabe script kiddies rounding up their few hundred chat buddies to all flood the top 10 sites on the Net to death? Or will we see hordes of the unsavvy sending 30MB e-mail attachments full of viruses to lists of 40 of their friends?

How about thousands upon thousands of people suddenly overwhelming Web sites that used to be able to keep up with normal traffic? Would the Net become so slow that it becomes unusable?

Now you might think that most AOL users won't become enlightened and switch to an ISP that gives them a lot of bandwidth, and the above scenario will never happen, right?

But don't be so sure. Unfortunately, now that AOL has merged with Time Warner, it looks like the Net newbies won't have to switch. AOL has the opportunity to bring the fast connections to the masses utilizing Time Warner's nationwide high-speed cable infrastructure.

Internet Armageddon?
Will that be end of the Net as we know it now? After all, AOL will continue to grow, preying upon the ignorant masses that will unwittingly spread across the net like locusts, devouring bandwidth and overwhelming servers across America.

Then the technically savvy will begin creating their own Internet -- to avoid using the mess that has become AOL-infested.

Slowly, their home networks will grow and grow, and begin connecting to each other with frame relay, connecting to existing private LANs, going wireless to the people across the street, drilling holes in the floor to run Ethernet to the apartments below.

Hundreds of these new Intranets will expand and expand, and companies will begin connecting them together into big private WANs until they grow enough to have names of their own, and these new intranets will become viable alternatives to the Internet.

Private intranets could become all the rage, until the one fateful day that AOL begins hooking into them and thereby starting the entire process all over again.

Will it happen? Could it happen? Do you have nightmares about it? Speak your mind in the TalkBack section below.