A few weeks ago, I called up my hosting service and renewed the URL for PopFi while, at the same time, upgrading my hosting plan. When I was talking to the customer service dude, he told me that shorter URLs, like this one, are becoming more and more valuable as most of the four- and five-letter word combinations were gone. It kind of surprised me at the time, but now I know: the Internet is running out of addresses.
The problem isn’t so much the URLs but the underlying technology behind those URLs. The Internet is currently built on IPv4 technology, and that’s where the space limitations come in. There is an expanded technology out there, IPv6, but good luck getting companies to spend money on it before they absolutely have to (though to be fair, Microsoft and Apple already work on IPv6 systems). The Internet is just too darn big for its britches, what with all the smartphones and whatnot!
“This is almost like a lot of the other challenges we face in society like climate change … if everyone does something, the right thing will happen, but if one individual does the right thing, it doesn’t make a difference,” said Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC, the domain manager for the Asia-Pacific region. “Your ISP needs to do a lot of work, and if you’re not willing to pay more money to your ISP, your poor old ISP has got to spend [extra] money without [extra] income.”
So, in other words, everyone wave goodbye to the Internet.
Tags: Internet addresses, the Internet is running out of addresses, Internet space is running out, IPv4, IPv6, Geoff Huston, domain names, technology news, Internet to run out of addresses in 2011