The Experiment That Has Never Ended

With IP addresses becoming more and more precious, as we reach the 4.3 billion network address limit, Vint Cerf the man in charge of making the decision 30 years ago says “We had no idea it would turn into the world’s global communications network.”

“It was 1977,” Mr. Cerf said, in an interview last week. “We thought we were doing an experiment.”

“The problem was, the experiment never ended,” 

At current estimates we will run out of IP addresses within the next 12 to 18 months  and the transition to the new system, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), is well under way. However, the current IPv4 and the new IPv6 are incompatible and there is some concern over how to transition from one to the next. In response Yahoo, Google and Facebook, whose combined traffic is more than a billion visits a day, have agreed to participate in a trial run on June 8, named World IPv6 Day. The participants are hoping that this experiment will shed some light on potential gotchas. 

“I almost wish we could train the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to come to people’s houses to help out with this,” said Mr. Cerf, now chief Internet evangelist at Google. “This is not just about adding extra numbers,” he said. “It’s a different system.”

Sounds like June 6th is a day to circle on your calendar, or perhaps June 7th...

Source: NYTimes.com

Internet Founder Speaks Out About ISPs

Vint Cerf, the man who developed the technical principles on which the internet works, has come out swinging at telephone and cable companies over their attempts to arbitrarily control the infrastructure. "Basically, it's like little kids in a tantrum: 'I'm not going to build this system unless you give me three scoops of ice cream and a pony,'" he said in a video posted on the blog on Tuesday. "My reaction to this is quite negative. It's harmful to the national interest to behave in this way because it is serious infrastructure — it's very much like the road ways." The debate has raged on in Canada this year as phone giant Bell has employed bandwidth throttling techniques that have caught the attention of smaller ISPs who buy capacity from them. "We have to provide incentives that cause those companies to behave differently or create an incentive for a competitor to put in facilities that will compete with them. I want to take away their monopoly mandate," Cerf said. "We have to make it a privilege to build the infrastructure. There has to be a reasonable rate of return, but it cannot be a confiscatory rate of return and it cannot be abused by allowing people to throttle competitors." Vint Cerf now works for Google as senior vice-president. CBC Story here.