Death of the Internet

Every couple of years we hear about The Impending Death Of The Internet. The latest death of the Internet meme is that we’re running out of IP address space, the numeric addresses that lie behind the “friendly” addresses made of words. We remember words more easily, but computers work better with numbers. We’re running out of those numbers.

One of the more interesting articles about the problem is this one, because it suggests a solution to the problem. Let the people who have excess IP addresses sell them. Renumbering a network takes time and money and can disrupt the operations of an organization, so this makes sense to me.

The first time I heard of The Impending Death Of The Internet was in the early 1990s. The number of routes that the routers that direct traffic in the core of the Internet was growing rapidly and the existing routers soon wouldn’t have enough memory to handle the load. Obviously we survived it, as routers with more memory and more powerful processors came on the market. We also survived various shortcomings of various routing protocols as they were adapted, updated, or abandoned over time. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been on the verge of running out of IP addresses.

We’ll survive this particular threat too, whether it’s by selling IP addresses, using some form of coercion to make organizations give back addresses without compensation, or by getting the really big service providers to convert to IPv6 on their backbones and give up the IPv4 addresses they currently use for the backbone. (The problem is already critical in Asia, who came late to the table when IP address space was handed out. I have worked with companies in India that exist behind four layers of NAT (Network Address Translation.)

This doesn’t mean that there is no problem. There is a problem, and the technical community has to solve it, and convince those who pay the bills for tech to pay for the next solution. But the ordinary user doesn’t need to get in a lather. The sky is not falling.