The Internet began to die the day it was born. It was difficult to prove ... especially in the hay days of the Arpanet, when the Internet was the sole province of select Educational Institutions and Government sites -- but it was dying, nevertheless.
Billions and Billions of bytes later, it is perhaps easier to notice the death of the global internet -- commonly referred to as the Internet or just "the Net". The tell-tale sign was the unleashing of the millions of users of America On Line and other major on-line services into the previously sacred domain of the Computer Professional. Millions of new Internet users generated an unprecedented demand for information, and that demand has helped to fuel the new engines of commerce: Internet Access and Internet Presence.
But a funny thing happened on the way to economic prosperity -- the Internet died. Did you notice?
Usenet newsgroups became forums for the SPAM artist. Major Internet backbone services became so over-whelmed that entire sections of the Internet disappeared for hours at a time. Domain Name Servers, those magical programs which convert names such as rs.internic.net into IP addresses, began to cache so many references to so many different hosts that a count-down to failure begins as soon as the program is started ... now where have I heard that before?
The routing table required for inter-connecting any two networks, world-wide, is now well beyond the memory limitations of much of the routine hardware presently in use on the Internet. The number of Internet users has reached the point where a single URL displayed on a Television commercial or announced on the Radio can bring a Web Site, or even an entire Network, to its knees.
Too much junk, too much traffic, too few resources. The Internet has died.