The Internet allows people to produce, store, and share an astounding amount of data - that's no secret to anybody. And yet most of us don't have a real grasp of just how much information the Internet carries. Is it possible to quantify all those words, images and videos? As it turns out, it is. And the answer is astounding.

Consider this: The Library of Congress holds more than 29 million books and magazines, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 57 million manuscripts. It took us two centuries to accumulate that collection. Today, we churn out an equivalent amount of digital information every 15 minutes, or about 100 times a day. Just last year, we created and copied three million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. That's enough data to fill a stack of books that extending to the sun and back -- a distance of 93 million miles - six times!

So what does "exaflood" mean? In the digital world, data is measured in bytes. A single digital character, a letter or number, is a single byte. A typewritten page is about 2,000 bytes, or two kilobytes, and a small, low-resolution image is about 100,000 bytes, or 100 kilobytes. There are about 5 million bytes, or five megabytes, in the complete works of Shakespeare, and a pickup truck full of books might amount to one billion bytes, or a gigabyte. One billion of those book-filled pickup trucks, or one billion gigabytes, is an exabyte.

The term "exaflood," coined by Bret Swanson of Seattle's Discovery Institute, refers to the torrent of data the Internet will have to handle in the very near future. The amount of information we upload, download and share is growing at an exponential rate. This is exciting, but it's also a challenge. The capacity of the Internet, its "bandwidth," is limited, and more bytes consume more bandwidth.

Last year, we created about 161 exabytes of digital information. But by 2010, we might produce as much as 988 exabytes of data. If we do reach that figure, video-sharing sites such as YouTube will be largely responsible, because video is far more bandwidth-hungry that other Internet applications. Downloading a single half-hour television show consumes more Internet bandwidth than receiving 200 emails a day for a full year, and downloading a single high-definition movie consumes as much bandwidth as 35,000 web pages.

The Internet was famously overbuilt during the 1990s, but much of that capacity is being used now or soon will be. A shortage of bandwidth will slow down service for everybody. It also poses a serious risk to our nation's economic health: Already, our "high-speed" broadband is far slower than what many Internet users in Asia enjoy, and we rank 16th in broadband deployment. If we don't upgrade our networks, Americans will be denied new products and services that require higher data speeds. The good news is that with investment and wise public policy, we can upgrade our broadband networks to meet the challenge of the coming "exaflood," ensuring that all Americans can enjoy everything the Internet has to offer.