The Internet report last week made news among the geek set, yet it is a topic for the wider public to deal with and deal with fairly rapidly.

The report came from Nemertes Research, a business technology research company, and it says that Internet capacity, particularly in North America, is likely to fall short of demand in the next three to five years. It is not the high-speed core of the Internet which will be affected, not the interstate part, but all the "roads" connecting to it from various service providers. This doesn't mean the Internet will break. Like a congested road, traffic will slow. Online games may not be an option, likewise videos on YouTube, or the TV show episode you missed and want to watch on a network's Web site. It will take more time to read the news or check a bank balance.

Moreover, the report notes, this lack of capacity means that the next innovation, the next Google or YouTube, may not appear because the lack of capacity will limit demand. The effect doesn't stop there. Already, Nemertes says, MIT researchers have experimental Internet devices with always-on video connections. Video requires a large capacity, yet with fuel costs making travel increasingly expensive, a large wall screen with a video link may become the default way for business people to communicate and for far flung families to keep in touch.

Talk about "net neutrality" has just made it outside geek culture, and it is intertwined with the capacity problem. Net neutrality means using law to ensure that Internet access is provided equally. The alternative is that Internet service providers charge higher rates for preferential access. In other words, if a car maker pays more you could quickly see a car advertisement from its Web site, but unless a consumer magazine pays more you won't have easy access to its report on how bad that car is. If net demand exceeds capacity, Internet providers may push harder for just this solution because it will enable them to control their network traffic in addition to making a lot of money.

It is all about money, of course. Nemertes estimated that companies need to spend $42 billion to $55 billion more to close the projected capacity gap. This is 60 to 70 percent more than providers now plan to invest.

In the real as opposed to the virtual world, government is about to spend almost $2 billion to rebuild just 35 miles of Interstate 94 from the Illinois border up into Milwaukee County. This is being done because roads are so crucial to our economy that they are public concerns.

The same should be true of the Internet, although this is not to suggest that we have a government-run Internet. It is to suggest that we need is some sort of government nudge. We should have one of two things. One would be a system of incentives, for example a tax break for added investment in Internet capacity combined with a requirement for net neutrality.

The other would be regulation of net providers as utilities. Just like electric companies, net providers can be thought of as critical links in the economy while they also function as an oligopoly (so few sellers that price competition doesn't apply) or monopoly in any given area.

Or the solution may be something else. What we need to do is start acting. Three years is very little time to implement rules and plan and execute a major equipment purchase and installation. If we don't, our whole system will have an added a strain that it doesn't need.