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:
1. The root servers may have a new operator.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has
overseen the operation of the Internet root servers since the non-profit
was founded in 1998. However, ICANN's contract is due to expire in
March, and a new U.S.-based organization could end up in charge of this
critical technical function.
The Internet's 13 root server
farms are at the top of the DNS hierarchy, which matches domain names
with their corresponding IP addresses for looking up Web sites. The
operation of the root server farms is overseen by the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA), which reports to ICANN.
Instead of renewing ICANN's contract for the IANA function, the
U.S. government has opened up the bid to other U.S.-based organizations.
On Nov. 10, 2011, the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) issued an open bid
for the IANA function. Bids were due Dec. 12 and a contract is expected
to be awarded in the first quarter of this year. The new contract for
the IANA function will last from April 1, 2012 until March 31, 2015.
2. A new company could operate the .com registry.
Verisign has operated the .com domain since 1999. The .com domain is the Internet's most popular top-level domain, with about 100 million .com names registered as of last month.
To put this figure in perspective, the Internet has a total of 220
million domain names registered in 280 top-level domains. The number of
.com names dwarfs every other domain: It's more than five times greater
than those registered in the second most popular extension, which is
Germany's .de.
Verisign signed an agreement with ICANN on March 1, 2006 to operate .com, and that contract expires on Nov. 30, 2012.
One positive indicator for Verisign: Last June, ICANN renewed the
company's contract to operate the .net registry, which has about 12
million registered names. Verisign will run the .net registry until
2017.
3. Up to 1,000 new top-level domains will start being introduced.
ICANN plans to launch a new program
Jan. 12 to add hundreds of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as
.hotel and .paris to the Internet. This controversial plan has been
under discussion for six years, and it is finally scheduled to begin.
ICANN's new gTLD program represents the biggest change to the Internet's naming system since 1998, when ICANN was formed.
ICANN has run two previous efforts to expand the Internet domain
name space: once in 2000, when it added seven extensions including .biz
and .info; and again in 2004, when it added eight more extensions such
as .asia and .jobs. None of these new domain name extensions has been
particularly successful.
However, if ICANN's latest attempt to expand the domain name space
succeeds, it could fundamentally change the way domain names are used.
Among the new categories of names that are expected to be approved
include: internationalized domain names in non-English language scripts;
geographically oriented domains for cities and regions; domain names
tied to specific interests as well as domain names tied to individual
companies and brands.
4. An additional 10,000 Web sites will support IPv6.
Sept. 30, 2012 is the deadline for all U.S. federal government agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites
and Web services. An estimated 10,000 Web sites fall under this
mandate, which could help drive IPv6 deployment in the United States
during the next 12 months.
Established by the Obama Administration two years ago, the federal
IPv6 mandate also requires agencies to upgrade internal client applications
that communicate with public Internet servers to use native IPv6. But
agencies have another two years - until September 2014 - to meet this
second deadline. Federal agencies are required to designate an IPv6
transition manager and to purchase network hardware and software that
complies with the federal government's IPv6 testing process.
IPv6
features an expanded addressing scheme that can support billions of
devices connected directly to the Internet. But IPv6 is not backwards
compatible with IPv4, which is running out of addresses. Network
operators can either support both protocols in what's called dual-stack
mode or translate between IPv4 and IPv6, which could add latency and
overhead cost.5. Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses.
The European regional Internet registry - RIPE - is expected to run
out of IPv4 addresses in 2012. Geoff Huston, adjunct research fellow at
the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures at Swinburne University
of Technology, estimates that RIPE will run out of its remaining IPv4 address space on July 22, 2012.
In April 2011, Asia depleted all of its IPv4 address space
except a small fraction held in reserve for start-up network operators.
The North American registry is expected to deplete its IPv4 address
space in 2013.
The depletion of IPv4 addresses in various regions of the world
will put more pressure on U.S. carriers and enterprises to begin
transitioning their networks to IPv6. For example, Comcast has said it will offer production-quality IPv6 services across its nationwide network in 2012.
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