HTTP, sadly, is now a point of bottleneck for the Internet. It was originally designed to send plain 7-bit ASCII text faster than FTP could, and without the high latency login procedure of FTP. This it can. However, images and other files are not 7-bit ASCII text, they are 8-bit data. They have to be encoded into plain text (by MIME) before being transferred over HTTP. This can and does result in quite a substantial increase in the amount of data that has to be sent, depending on the file it may be anything between 10% and 30%.
There is a secure version of HTTP called HTTPS that can use any given encryption method as long as it is understood by both sides.
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