It's a perfectly rational fear and there have been reports of networks
in Europe severely restricting, or even banning, such traffic. In the
end, though, the network usage will /always/ increase to the available
capacity. That is the nature of any network. The link from the UK to
the US is utterly unusable for any traffic, bar e-mail, from about 10am
until about 7-9pm GMT. A typical web page might take 30 seconds to
download at 10am, but take over 4 minutes at 2pm. Ok, the timings
tests weren't very precice or scientific, but imagine what that sort
of slow-down does to videoconferencing.
Interestingly, rumour has it that the complete failure of the
transatlantic link for several days, last year, at Sprintlink was partly
the result of automatic traffic and web robots.
Videoconferencing is too useful to vanish, but I suspect that its usage
is going to change quite substantially over the next few years, along
with the way that people perceive the net. Attitudes only shift when
they have to, but with the massive increase in net usage, gridlock
can't be avoided forever.
Jonathan