There's a well-known phenomenon in civil engineering that if you add more roads/lanes to handle a growing traffic load, the effect of the new roads will be to encourage more new traffic -- it's like the Red Queen's race, trying to keep up. With comms technology, it's orders of magnitude faster to reach the next "necessary" expansion.
Internet usage used to be limited, slow, and expensive, used only where essential. As the network and bandwidth expanded and dropped in price, people began to take advantage to do all sorts of things that were never considered desirable, much less essential, previously. Social media is a big part of that. Sharing pop music ? Pets on camera 7/24 ? Tons of AI-generated slop photos, videos, music ? AI is particularly bad because the "users" dumping more data on the Web are not restricted by human metabolism, but function at rates as high (or higher) as the Internet can sustain, taking a larger and larger share of that ever-growing pie and leaving humans unable to find the useful stuff (at least without doing a massive search for the most trivial things, using more CPU cycles, more netbaud, etc.). At this point, I think that if humans died off, the Internet would reach, and hold, saturation for quite some time before software and hardware failures started taking the worst exploiters offline. And failure of comms might actually increase saturation before it got dropped.
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