The Internet may start running out of room in the next year.

With bandwidth-hogging Web sites such as YouTube becoming more and more popular, Internet demand is rising at a rate of 60 percent a year. Some experts believe that by 2010 Internet users will start suffering brief “brownouts,” and that by 2012 the Web could be rendered too slow and unreliable for important business.

“Today people know how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games, but by 2012 that traffic jam could last all day long,” explained Ted Ritter, an analyst for the think tank Nemertes Research.

While most projections of future disaster leave us skeptical and cold, this one actually has us shaking in our cubicles.