... such work not as a way to directly make money but rather as a way to spur faster development in areas of the internet where it thinks progress needs to move faster.
"At Google, we believe that IPv6 is essential to the continued health and openness of the internet — and that by allowing all devices on a network to talk to each other directly, IPv6 will enable innovation and allow the internet's continued growth," the company says on the Google IPv6 page.
Google is not alone in IPv6 advocacy. Russ Housley, the current chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force, envisions every home equipped with an internet-connected gas meters, thermostats and other such devices.
"If you have every home equipped, the number of internet addresses exceeds the space that is available in IPv4. You just can't do that," Housley said.
Difficult transition
So if IPv6 is so great, why aren't we all using it? Because it is a difficult transition that requires a lot of work across the entire technology industry — not just at internet sites, but also in operating systems, server software, management tools, set-top boxes, network equipment and agencies that dole out network addresses.
Networking giant Cisco has even found that typing IPv6 addresses is an issue. The elements of an IPv6 address are separated with a colon, a change from the full-stop that IPv4 uses.
Worse, IPv6 investments are not rewarded immediately because IPv6 is not backward-compatible with IPv4. That has walled IPv6 off into a separate domain that could not communicate with the mainstream IPv4 internet, though some work is under way to better bridge the two.
"What is slowing down adoption is that if I want this [one company's IPv6 work] to be useful, I depend on everybody else in the universe to do the same thing," said Alain Durand, director of IPv6 architecture and internet governance at Comcast, during the discussion. However, he did point to some work under way that would make even small corners of IPv6 useful as opposed to an expense with no return.
Google, though, is trying to show that IPv6 is attainable. As well as Google search and Google Maps, the company offers Alerts, Calendar, Docs, Finance, Gmail, Health, iGoogle, News, Notebook, Reader and Sites over IPv6.
Google is also organising IPv6 conferences of its own, with its most recent IPv6 conference on 19-20 March, which drew participation from Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Comcast and the Beijing Internet Institute; China is a big fan of IPv6. It is also urging governments as well as companies to adopt IPv6.
Not rocket science
Colitti said IPv6 is not rocket science and suggested people begin IPv6 pilot projects. They should be production-ready, but do not need to be built to handle the scale of traffic as the main IPv4 network. Google's own IPv6 work began as a project done in '20 percent time' — the time Google engineers get to pursue their own interests.
Administrators whose sites already have IPv6 users should brace themselves for spikes in traffic growth as they bring new services online, though. After the Google Maps IPv6 move, Google's outgoing network traffic over IPv6 tripled overnight, Colitti said. Currently Google has about 150,000 people using the site through IPv6.
Even though the overall IPv6 transition is showing the typically human ignore-it-until-it's-a-crisis behaviour, the context for evaluating IPv6 is changing as the IPv4 growth era comes to a close.
"We're right now two to three years away from depleting IPv4 altogether," Richard Jimmerson, chief information officer of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, said at the panel discussion. Late in the last decade and early in this one, some predicted that the IPv4 address depletion is what would cause the move to IPv6, he said. "Those folks who made those predictions are partially correct."
