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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