Having once been brought to its knees by Napster, the entertainment industry may have to look to the site for its future.

The smooth running of the internet may depend on a technology that has long been synonymous with illegal downloading and online piracy, one of the foremost authority's on network infrastructure has said.

In order to accommodate the growing popularity of bandwidth-rich services such as YouTube, internet users may be asked to host videos and other content on their home computers and then share that content with other computers whose owners want to access it.

The prediction - which would mean that the world's personal computers would become one, giant peer-to-peer network of the sort that was made famous by Napster, the file-sharing site - was made by VeriSign, which runs the largest so-called "top-level domain", .com.

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By spreading content around the internet, the network was less likely to be crushed under the weight of demand for services on popular sites such as YouTube, which were visited by an increasing number of the world's 1.3 billion internet users, VeriSign said.

"Ultimately, peer-to-peer networks are going to make the most sense (to meet demand)," Ken Silva, chief technology officer at VeriSign, said. "You're going to get to a point where streaming video to a billion homes from a single point is just not going to be possible.

"There may be a bad stigma attached to peer-to-peer but it may be necessary in order to distribute the traffic."

Peer-to-peer networks lighten the load on websites by allowing an internet user to draw content from other personal computers on which the same content already resides. The technology was made popular by file-sharing sites, some of which were later shut down by the record industry, and has more recently been employed by Joost, an internet TV service which has industry backing.

Mr Silva also said that content providers - such as YouTube - would have to shoulder some of the cost of improving the network, echoing concerns expressed by ISPs that it was unfair that they should pay when the demand for bandwidth was being created by popular websites. "They're going to have to update their delivery platforms," he said.

The countries where the internet was feeling the most strain were in North Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East, he said. Developed countries were in a better position to handle the increased use of video services such as the BBC iPlayer, but the need to find new ways to cope with demand was "becoming more pressing with every passing day".

According to Entanet, an ISP based in Shropshire, the cost of buying bandwidth from BT has risen by 25 per cent in the past year and is likely to increase increase by a similar amount in the next 12 months - largely as a result of increased use of video streaming on services like the BBC iPlayer.

But some internet experts disagreed with the need for peer-to-peer networks, saying that popular sites were already addressing the problem by using so-called "content distribution networks" such as one provided by the company Akamai.

"If you take advantage of a network of thousands of servers that are distributed across the internet, then you ship content - popular videos, for instance - to those servers and have it served locally," said Jay Daley, head of IT at Nominet, the operator of the .co.uk domain.

VeriSign said it had already made significant moves to improve the way traffic to .com sites was distributed, setting up servers in India, Cairo and Paris to cope with demand in those areas. Now, only 20 per cent of the traffic to .com sites from those regions had to leave the area, with the remainder handled by local servers.

In China, 95 per cent of the traffic to .com sites was handled locally.

Verisign said that every day, .com websites received more than 35 billion requests for data and it predicted levels of 100 billion daily "queries" by 2010. The number of times a .com site was looked up had doubled every 18 months since 2000, it said.

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