• ReadWriteWeb, Thursday, July 22, 2010 1:13 PM

Hard as it is to believe, the World Wide Web is on track to run out of Internet addresses in about a year, according to John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. As ReadWriteWeb notes, "The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist."

According to these experts, the Web is about to experience a data explosion, the likes of which we've not seen before, and a direct result of what ReadWriteWeb calls "sensor data, smart grids, [radio frequency identification tags] and other Internet of Things data." Other reasons include the increase in connected mobile devices, and the continued growth in user-generated content. ReadWriteWeb uses the warnings as an opportunity to argue for a new internet protocol.

Presently, the Web largely uses IPv4, Internet Protocol version 4. IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol, and thankfully supports a vastly larger number of unique IP addresses. Enough to give every person on the planet over 4 billion addresses, apparently.

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