In what appears to be something of a Catch-22, the internet will likely become a victim of its own popularity, slowing down to dial-up speed over the next few years, according to a study by Nemertes Research, a business technology consultancy.

By 2010, the proliferation of online video, which was made possible by high-speed broadband access, will cripple the internet, researchers believe.

"Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson told USA Today. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."

According to the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), a technology public interest group that has embraced the findings in the report, more money will have to be spent on web infrastructure to keep pace with the explosion of users and bandwidth-intensive applications.

"We're not trying to play Paul Revere and say that the internet's going to fall," said IIA Co-Chairman Larry Irving. "If we make the investments we need, then people will have the internet experience that they want and deserve."

In October, Larry Roberts, an engineer largely responsible for the creation of the internet in the late 1960s, issued a similar conclusion. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Roberts said video would create a data overload that could kill the internet.