ICANN introduce more IP addresses

[ryanhellyer]

For those of you who have been affected by a shortage of IP addresses in your organisation, you will be happy to know ICANN has announced a whole bunch more IP addresses. I remember only a few years ago not being able to hook up another computer to the net due to a lack of IP addresses within the organisation I was working for. It seemed ridiculous, but hopefully it will be a thing of the past with an increased number of IP addresses available.

ICANN turns on next-gen IP addresses | CNET News.com

Do any of you know if this will affect the cost of having your own IP address on a shared hosting account?

[Willemina]

Wikipedia has some interesting information about this ... IPv6 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The article claims that the new system will allow for easier identification of the physical address of people due to a "more-strict hierarchical address assignment". This could be useful for targetting people in particular areas, but I think there are also some privacy concerns as it will lesson anonimity on the web.

The following quote is from http://tech.hellyeah.com/display_doc.phtml?id=28

assume that there are 15 billion people on the planet. (currently, there are only 6.1 billion, and the largest estimates for the next fifty years project 12 billion). With 128 bits per IP address, each person could have 2.26e28 IP addresses to themselves. If we reduce it to 64 bits, each person would still have 1.2 billion addresses.