Multinational corporate telecom monster AT&T wants you to know the internet as we know it will be dead in a mere three years.

“Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded,” reports Andrew Donoghue for CNet News. “The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

If you believe this I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn. But then the telecom multinats will say and do whatever is required in order to sell their vision of the future — a centralized, gated, pay-per-view, and censored internet, a model based on television, the medium with hundreds of channels and nothing on.

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.

In other words, in order to avoid this supposed physical capacity, Mr. Cicconi wants the government — i.e., you and me, the perpetually fleeced commoners — to pay for a new infrastructure, one with controls built-in, as behemoth corporations never pay for infrastructure if they can avoid it. And thanks to no shortage of corporate “lobbyists” prowling about the whorehouse on the Potomac, you can bet your bottom dollar they won’t. Of course, Cicconi does not say you and I will pay for the new Borg internet. But then he does not have to. Corporate socialism is rife these days.

“As our titanic democracy is sinking and the band of trivia and denial plays on, each Internet connection can function as an intellectual life preserver,” writes Mark Klempner. “The net has also proved invaluable as a way for concerned citizens to offer support to each other, and to act together for political and social change.”

It is precisely this organizational and political aspect of the internet our rulers loathe and fear, thus the pell mell rush to defang the medium under a Chicken Little mantra — the bandwidth sky is falling and we have to do something about it. Or rather massive corporations sucking up government contracts have to do something about it.

Mr. Cicconi and AT&T are serving notice: we have three years to get our act together.