The web as we know it is quickly shifting under our feet. It’s shifting under our feet and shifting under many major corporations’ feet, and at the heart of the movement is innovation and greed.

Per month, the world is consuming upwards of 4 billion hours of YouTube, they’re tweeting around 2 billion times, 90 million active users on Instagram, and Facebook is getting a trillion hits. Behind each of these incredible statistics are equally incredible data centers. However, based on a recent study by Nemertes Research, these resource intensive sites are wreaking havoc on the Internet’s slowly decaying infrastructure.

What was once thought as limitless is already starting to see its bounds. In the past year, two of the three major telephone companies have switched from an unlimited price plan to a monthly allotment. AT&T has already been plagued by iPhone phenomenon. Before the iPhone, mobile internet use was minimal, but after the iPhone was introduced it absolutely blew AT&T’s infrastructure out of the water. Only now, five years after the iPhone was introduced are they caught back up with the other companies, but their image has forever been stained.

As people start consuming more data and larger data, the datacenters and the fiber optics that distribute the content must grow. Many large corporations have been more concerned about the bottom line during this recession and they think that upgrading their bandwidth capabilities is superfluous. Unfortunately the damage has already been done and it will take some time to get back to where the capabilities need to be.

Until the bandwidth catches back up to the need, consumers are going to be stuck with paying premiums for blocks of data and plenty of “unable to connect” alerts.