This will cause a major crisis, Bradner argues, because demand for expansion of the network will continue. The Internet, he says, will have effectively stopped working.

"Under current routing technology, there is no reason to think the Internet will keep working for more than a couple more years because the routers will collapse," he says.

Colleagues Respond

Some of Bradner's colleagues in the world of Internet infrastructure say his view is overly pessimistic.

Fred Baker, president of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-governmental organization that works to develop the architecture of the Internet, thinks that Bradner is overly worried.

"Yes, there are issues in Internet routing," he says. "There is not evidence that the Internet is in the process of collapse."

Baker says that everyone agrees that the growth of the Internet's central routing tables is exponential. The question is whether router hardware and routing protocols can be improved enough so that it can deal with this growth.

Baker thinks it can. He argues that as computer memory becomes exponentially cheaper with time, the amount of memory available to computer designers will match the need for more powerful routers.