Earlier this year, Nemertes Research reconstituted a 2008 report claiming the Internet was about to run out of bandwidth, and that looming brown outs would be hitting us any day now. The "Exaflood" myth, cooked up by the same think tank that brought you intelligent design, has been repeatedly debunked by network capacity experts, who note that the Internet's growth is actually quite manageable with only modest infrastructure upgrades.

As we just got done exploring in a long post on network neutrality, telecom lobbyists concocted this pseudo-emergency as a political ploy. Carriers realize that the only way to retain the kind of power they're used to in the face of voice and content competition is to constrict the pipe. But with giant quarterly revenues and hardware and bandwidth prices dropping, it's hard to justify.

Enter the Exaflood: the idea that if you don't give carriers whatever they'd like (less regulation, no net neutrality laws, no price controls, huge subsidies and tax credits, less consumer protection, metered billing) the Internet will grind to a halt and we'll all be crying over our clogged tubes. Are you scared yet?

Nemertes Research, which takes funding from AT&T, has been at the forefront of the Exaflood myth. Nemertes co-founder Johna Till Johnson has been the firm's primary scare machine, penning all manner of editorial about looming brownouts. When those brown outs failed to materialize, Johnson penned an editorial at Network World last May trying to argue that the Exaflood already happened and you just missed it. Despite a solid debunking, Johnson is back again this week with yet another editorial at Network World, who has developed a nasty habit of not identifying who their authors work for. This time, Johnson says we're facing a horrible peering apocalypse:Poof! Scary! Complete crap, but yeah, really terrifying.

While last mile upgrades are expensive, companies are making more than enough money off of flat rate broadband pricing, services and ads to fund upgrades and exorbitant executive compensation for decades to come, making the assumption that a move to per-bit billing is essential junk. If that's junk, so is her bizarre peering domino effect calamity. Second, the FCC's neutrality rules have absolutely nothing to do with banning ISPs from experimenting with creative pricing options. Even if they did, Verizon lobbyists would kill such restrictions.

The very idea that network capacity constraints have anything to do with network neutrality is a tired old red herring. Carriers (be they here or in Canada) consistently use the capacity specter as a way to justify anti-competitive behavior (conveniently never offering a shred of raw network data). Former AT&T engineer David Isenberg, who has spent far more years around networks than Johnson, does a nice job with the latest Nemertes debunking, and gets extra points for working the phrase "dinosaur feces" into a blog post:All of this once again brings us back to where we began: good old Ed Whitacre, his fears of life as a dumb pipe, and his dreams of playing troll under the Internet bridge.