Bob Cringely is kind of a controversial tech columnist — he loves making big predictions, and tech bloggers love pointing out which ones he gets spectacularly wrong. But he also gets a lot spectacularly right. His last two columns have been absolute must-reads in the tech blogosphere, and both have to do with Google’s plan for world domination. Well, not quite — but close.

All that notwithstanding, something else from his first column on the subject caught our eye:

It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY — a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs.

Of Cringely’s many predictions, this one is surely one of the least far-fetched. He is right — as demand for online video increases, demands on the existing broadband infrastructure will exceed its capacity. Now, under the Dorgan-Snowe “net neutrality” bill, ISPs would not be allowed to offer the Interenet equivalent of HOV lanes. What would that mean to the average user? A slower Internet for everybody, with packets backed up from here to the interstate.

But in his next column, Cringely explained that different portions of the Internet can be used for different things:

The trick here is to see the difference between dark fiber, lighted fiber, and Internet fiber. The most expensive of these is Internet fiber — fiber connected directly to the [backbone of the] Internet and for which ISPs are paying premium prices. What those ISPs need to make P2P work better, however, isn’t fiber connected to the Internet but fiber that’s connected to other ISPs but NOT to the Internet.

From an ISP’s perspective, P2P is annoying in any case but becomes REALLY annoying when peers have to find each other by reaching out over the public Internet. If somehow that copy of American Idol could be found by polling only local nodes, then the cost of P2P would be much lower for ISPs. In fact, it would be almost nothing. The trick, then, is to expand the number of local peers to increase the likelihood that all the bits can be found on the local net.

Cringely is describing something like Akamai, a company that makes content available faster on the Internet, and which could be threatened by Dorgan-Snowe.

But he is also describing something that the Dorgan-Snowe backers claim to fear: a tiered Internet. Why would a tiered Internet be bad? They never really say. But here Bob Cringely is describing a separate network tier that runs faster than the main Internet backbone, and guess what? It would have a direct, noticeable and favorable impact on consumers.