So much for the notion that there is “unlimited space on the internet”…
The problem, says Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the non-profit Internet Society, is simple math: the Internet Protocol addresses that are assigned to differentiate networks and individual computers at the edges of the Internet have 32 digits, allowing for only a finite number of addresses - about 4.2 billion. That may seem like plenty of space for the world’s online population. But huge swaths of IP addresses were originally allocated to the groups that helped build the Internet, starting with the Department of Defense and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and can’t be reassigned.
Internet Engineering Task Force (or IETF) engineers met at a conference last week to discuss rolling out the Internet Protocol Version Six, or IPv6, addressing system, which would allow for the creation of “trillions of trillions” of IP addresses.
IPv6 would also play a big part in combating spam, according to the IETF.
In today’s addressing system, large groups of IP addresses - what Daigle calls “the swamp” - are often assigned and then left unused for a period of time. Spammers can impersonate those virtual identities to circumvent e-mail filters based on blacklisted IP addresses. By starting a new accounting system from scratch, IPv6 could allow more careful tracking of which IP addresses are assigned where, limiting the IP identities that spammers can spoof, she says.
