Although it has been hard for companies to financially justify the expense of embracing the next-generation standard for wiring together the internet, the incentives are now arriving — and Google itself stands to benefit from the resulting democratisation of networking.
Google thinks the time is ripe to begin adopting Internet Protocol version 6. The search giant, which handles gargantuan amounts of traffic, has gradually been making more of its web properties available over IPv6, which, despite being defined for more than a decade, is still rare compared to the current IPv4.
The company has been gradually making its properties available over the new standard, starting with an IPv6 access to its search engine in March 2008. The range of other Google properties similarly available expanded to include Google Maps last week, said Lorenzo Colitti, a Google network engineer who spoke on Wednesday at an Internet Society panel discussion at an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in San Francisco.
The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate — 4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many are not generally available, and expert estimates forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.
To sidestep the limitations, engineers have come up with patches such as network address translation (NAT) and dynamic IP addresses. But the way Coletti sees things, those fixes reinforce the status quo on the net: a relatively large number of clients such as PCs or set-top boxes connecting to a relatively small number of servers with the privilege of their own IPv4 addresses. Clients generally retrieve the data from servers but rarely host it on their own.
"This is what the internet does, but it could do so much more," he said. Moving to IPv6 lifts the limits on what can be done in the future: "We don't know what those applications are going to be. They didn't know in the 1980s that the web was going to come along."
Competitive advantage for Google?
The future Google wants to enable through IPv6 is a decentralised, less hierarchical one in which any device can reach any other device on the network without relying on server intermediaries.
That may sound odd for Google, one of the biggest powers on the internet. But remember that Google's core business strength — search — is based on its skill in making some sense out of the chaos of information available on the internet. A future in which the clout of central gatekeepers is reduced is one in which Google has a competitive advantage.
After all, the company has hundreds of thousands of servers dedicated to the tasks of crawling the internet for new data and assessing what is most important. To make that assessment, it invests heavily not on objectively evaluating what is on the internet, but rather on figuring out how to interpret the available signals that everybody on the internet supplies on their own. And it has a directly related advertising business that funds further work.
For a technical taste of how Google sees the world, peruse The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data, published recently by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and written by Google researchers Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira.
Read this
Twin hurdles that could trip internet upgrade plans
Many will have heard about the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, but there's a less well-known shortage that could be equally telling
Yahoo likes Semantic Web technology, in which content is labelled with tags that help computers better understand its meaning, but Google's technology is designed to comprehend a broader, less structured net, the researchers say.
"The first lesson of web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn't available," the Google researchers said.
Carrot and sticks for IPv6
So why move to IPv6? Colitti offered some incentives and warnings. On the carrot side, he said IPv6 opens the door to new technology impossible with IPv4 and can ease network-administration headaches — and you can bet that Google, with hundreds of thousands of servers at a minimum, has plenty of those. On the stick side, he said, building large-scale NAT into networks is expensive and limiting.
"Those devices will be very expensive... and if you do NAT, it's a support nightmare. It's very hard to maintain," he said. Though adding IPv6 support might not have enticed companies with big profits thus far, the full financial equation is more complicated. "Is the avoidance of future costs an economic incentive?"
But in the big picture, Google's support of IPv6 appears to be less a shorter-term concern about administrative headaches and more a desire to see a vibrant, active, open and adaptable future internet.
Google's IPv6 support is similar in broad terms to its efforts to build for the open-source Android mobile-phone operating system, Chrome web browser, and new, pervasive wireless internet access technology. Google executives have justified...
