FoxNews repeats a Times of London story:
Report: The End of the Internet Is NearThe end of the Internet is near — and in less than three years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The reason? More than 85% of the available addresses have already been allocated and the OECD predicts we will have run out completely by early 2011.
These aren’t the normal web addresses you type into your browser’s window, and which were recently freed up by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body responsible for allocating domain names, to allow thousands of new internet domains ending in, for instance, .newyork, .london or .xxx.
Beneath those names lie numerical Internet protocol addresses that denote individual devices connected to the internet. These form the foundation for all online communications, from e-mail and web pages to voice chat and streaming video.
When the current IP address scheme was introduced in 1981, there were fewer than 500 computers connected to the Internet. Its founders could be forgiven for thinking that allowing for a potential 4 billion would last for ever. However, less than 30 years later, the Internet is rapidly running out. Every day thousands of new devices ranging from massive web servers down to individual mobile phones go online and gobble up more combinations and permutations.
“Shortages are already acute in some regions,” says the OECD. “The situation is critical for the future of the internet economy.”
As addresses run dry we will all feel the pinch: Internet speeds will drop and new connections and services will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain. The solution to the IP address shortage is an upgrade to new addresses that can accommodate our hunger for online connectivity. Such a system, called IPv6, was agreed more than a decade ago, providing enough addresses for billions upon billions of devices as well as improving Internet phone and video calls, and possibly even helping to end e-mail spam.
Like the story says, THAT'S WHY WE HAVE IPv6 ROLLING OUT.
Jeebus cripes. At least in the tech world, we find solutions to problems before they actually happen, unlike in the political world where politicians opine that even if they were to allow it, it would take 10 years to bring new offshore or ANWR oil production online -- when if we'd started 10 years ago when we should have, we'd have it by now.
The other thing is, there are solutions even in the IPv4 realm to extend the number of available addresses. Take a university with a class B address space (16,581,375 available addresses). What does a university need with a class B address? Plus, they could assign a single address to a dorm (or a cluster of dorms) and NAT behind that address to serve however many internal addresses they might need. The thing I see happening if IPv6 isn't generally adopted soon is some of these IP hogs giving up subnets that they don't actually need and doing more internal mapping to avoid needing all those external addresses.
But I hardly see it being as bad as, "As addresses run dry we will all feel the pinch: Internet speeds will drop and new connections and services will either be expensive or simply impossible to obtain." First of all, Internet speeds are not a function of the number of IP addresses available, suggesting that the writers are either idiots or gullible hacks (or both). Secondly, if IPv6 rolls out, or if ISPs start using NAT to share external addresses among their clients instead of assigning actual external addresses to single clients who don't need static IP service, services will be no more expensive or difficult to obtain than they are right now.
This is simply scaremongering of the worst kind, in my opinion.
That's not even good scaremongering, it's just stupid, lazy... I hate to call it journalism, that's a slander against the handful of decent journalists who actually try to write decent stories.
Perhaps "scribbling" was the word you were looking for?