Internet Protocol Version 6

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced Thursday that it has delegated the final 300 million addresses available through version 4 of the Internet protocol (IPv4) to the five Regional Internet Registries. These RIRs will over the next few years assign these remaining addresses to new Internet-connected computers, smart phones, televisions and other devices worldwide.

Internet service providers (ISPs) now need to step up and implement IPv6, says Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and a former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) scientist instrumental in creating the Internet. Whereas IPv6 has been available for the past 15 years, ISPs were able to squeeze a lot of mileage out of IPv4 addresses using network address translation boxes to enable many private addresses to share a single public IP (Internet protocol) address, according to Cerf, a former ICANN chairman.

As new devices come online, they are beginning to receive IPv6 addresses. This is likely to mean little to people buying these devices, but it is very important to businesses, social networks and other organizations trying to reach those people. Web sites whose e-mail and Web servers are configured to communicate only with IPv4 addresses cannot be accessed by IPv6 devices.

In the long term, however, Web sites will find it difficult to support both IPv4- and IPv6-enabled networks. For this reason, Google has been supporting IPv6 since early 2008 and moved YouTube to the new protocol in February 2010. To promote the move to IPv6, the ISOC is hosting World IPv6 day on June 8, during which Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Cisco and other companies will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour test period.

If the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is handled properly, the end result should be akin to Y2K—when at the turn of the millennium computer operators feared the worst but very few serious problems actually arose.