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IPv4 addresses to run out Thursday

Kevin Murphy, February 1, 2011, Domain Tech

ICANN will announce the final depletion of its pool of IPv4 addresses this Thursday.
The Number Resource Organization will hold a “ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses”.
The NRO is ICANN’s supporting organization representing Regional Internet Registries, the outfits responsible for handing out IP addresses to network operators.
ICANN, the Internet Society and the Internet Architecture Board will also participate in the event, scheduled for Thursday February 3 at 1430 UTC. It will be webcast here.
Today, APNIC, the Asia-Pacific RIR, said that it has been assigned two /8 blocks of addresses, meaning IANA is down to its Final Five chunks.
Thursday’s ceremony will presumably entail ICANN/IANA officially handing out these last five blocks to the five RIRs, one each, as called for by its allocation policy.
After that, it’s all gone. No more IPv4. The age of IPv6 is upon us.
It is currently estimated that the RIRs will themselves run out of IPv4 in September. After that, if they need IP addresses they’ll receive IPv6.
IPv4 is rapidly becoming a scarce commodity.
Many people, including ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush, have predicted a “gray market” for addresses to appear, with address blocks changing hands for less than the cost of upgrading to IPv6.
The focus on Thursday, however, will be all about the measures network operators need to implement in order to remain viable on an internet increasingly running IPv6 equipment.

Google and Facebook to cut off thousands for World IPv6 Day

Kevin Murphy, January 12, 2011, Domain Tech

Some of the internet’s biggest companies are going to deliberately break their web sites for a day, for hundreds of thousands of users, in order to raise awareness of IPv6.
Google, Facebook and Yahoo are among the companies that will go into production with the protocol for 24 hours, starting at midnight UTC, June 8, for World IPv6 Day.
For the day, the companies will make their sites accessible using a dual stack of IPv4 and IPv6. Most users will be unaffected and will be able to access the services as normal.
But Google predicted on its blog that 0.05% of users may “experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”
Facebook purportedly has 500 million users, so presumably it’s expecting 250,000 of them to be cut off from its site for the day, with a corresponding dip in ad impressions and revenue.
World IPv6 Day is being overseen by the Internet Society. ICANN/IANA does not appear to have a role, despite it having global responsibility over IP address allocations.
ISOC’s site says:

The goal of the Test Drive Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The IPv4 pool is estimated to be exhausted next month, when IANA allocates the final five /8 blocks to the Regional Internet Registries. The RIRs are expected to run out of addresses in November.
Not too long after that, IPv6 will be the only choice if you want to obtain IP addresses through official channels. If you want IPv4, you’ll have to head to the gray market.

New TLDs get their own conference

Kevin Murphy, September 28, 2010, Domain Registries

Former ICANN staffer Kieren McCarthy is organizing a conference dedicated to new top-level domains, set to run in San Francisco for two days next February.
The .nxt conference will be hosted by the Internet Society’s SF Bay Area chapter. Pricing is expected to be in the $300 to $500 range.
The organizers are currently looking for speakers, exhibitors and attendees from registries, registrars, potential TLD applicants, consultants and marketers.
McCarthy told me that the idea is to focus more on the business opportunity side of things, rather than the policy-making that dominates ICANN meetings.
“Once all the argument is over and the rules are set, I thought it would be great to have a conference focused on what we were all going to do with the Internet,” he said in an email.
The agenda is expected to be split into four tracks: policy, implementation, models and marketing, tackling subjects such as how to run a registry and how to effectively market a TLD.