Home

Accomodating Growth

As shown by the chart below (from the Network Wizards web page, the explosive growth of the number of hosts on the Internet shows little sign of slowing down.

To allow for continued growth in the number of hosts and domain names, a new system, IP version 6, is being introduced. This protocol is backwards compatible with existing IP (version 4), but offers many new benefits, most notably, a much larger address space. The current IP protocol's 32-bit address space is being expanded to 128-bit. (This translates to 2^128 or a hundred billion billion billion billion addresses.) The new protocol offers simplified routing facilities, new broadcast/multicast/anycast implementations, new headers, and facilities for authentication. For more information on the current status of IPv6 including a list of relevant RFC's, see http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/surveys/stallings/stallings-orig.html

Another possible issue with the rapid growth of domain names is the increased incidence of domain name conflicts. ICANN is proposing online dispute resolution to try to effeciently address this growing area of concern. More about this can be found on our dispute resolution page.

As you can see from Network Solutions' cumulative domain name registration graph,the continuing acceleration of domain name registration could make dispute resolution an increasedly important issue: