The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a warning that as the H1N1 virus forces more and more people to stay home from work and school, those people could be logging on from home and “overwhelm” Internet providers' network capabilities.

The GAO report went on to say that, "private internet providers have limited ability to prioritize traffic ... Some actions, such as reducing customers' transmission speeds or blocking popular web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization".

Worry about that last sentence, folks.  The plan appears to be to use the "pandemic" as a excuse to get the mechanisms in place to throttle or restrict Internet traffic. And once such mechanisms are in place, controlling their use could be all but impossible.