A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Internet by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US$137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to a study by Nemertes Research Group.

Internet users will create 161 exabytes (quintillion bytes) of new data this year, they said.

The study is the first to “apply Moore’s Law (or something very like it) to the pace of application innovation on the ‘Net,” the study says.