5 major changes facing the Internet in 2012

2012 is poised to go down in Internet history as one of the most significant 12-month periods from both a technical and policy perspective since the late 1990s, when this network-of-networks stopped being a research project and became an engine of economic growth. This year the Internet will face several milestones as it undergoes its biggest-ever technical upgrade, from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6. In addition, key contracts that the U.S. federal government controls for Internet infrastructure and operations are being re-bid.

Taken together, these events could result in monumental changes in both who operates the Internet infrastructure as well as how these operations are handled:

• The root servers may have a new operator.
• A new company could operate the .com registry.
• Up to 1,000 new top-level domains will start being introduced.
• An additional 10,000 websites will support IPv6.
• Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses.