Final IPv4 Allocation Ceremony Monday, 14 March 2011 ICANN Meeting San Francisco, California >> Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd please take your seats we're about to begin our program. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome CEO, president, ICANN, Mr. Rod Beckstrom. [ Applause ] >>MR. ROD BECKSTROM: Thank you. Please be seated. When IPv4 was defined in 1980, no one thought it would lead to a world where billions of people would have cheap, fast data communications available to them. IPv4 connected computers, and in doing that, it has now connected people around the globe. It was more than a half a year after IPv4 was defined when the stand- alone IBM PC hit the market. Despite that, the idea of running out of addresses was hard to conceive at the time, but 15 years later, in the mid-1990s, Internet engineers were predicting that the growth of usage on the Internet would exhaust the seemingly plentiful addressing resources sometime in the 21st century. To prepare for that future, the Internet Architecture Board challenged the Internet Engineering Task Force to design an expansion to this necessary infrastructure resource, and the IETF took the challenge and adopted the new standard for IPv6, expanding the number space in 1996. ICANN, in its role of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, has been the steward for the maintenance and allocation of both address families, IPv4 and IPv6. Last month, 15 years after the creation of the successor to IPv4, the final five IPv4 blocks of addresses were allocated from the IANA-held pool and distributed to the regional Internet registries. It was an important day for everyone in the room. The security and stability of the DNS is a key goal for ICANN and a key function for the DNS is resolving names to addresses. We need more addresses now than those last five IPv4 blocks have been allocated, and IPv6 gives us them. 340 undecillion of them, to be precise. And as we noted before, that's more than the number of stars in the entire universe. What is needed now is the widespread deployment of IPv6. The DNS infrastructure is a key part of that, and the ICANN community needs to ensure that it is ready to run with IPv6 so that deployment to Internet users is as smooth as possible. I'd now like to hand-present this commemorative shirt to Raúl Echeberria, chair of the NRO. Please come and join me. Raúl. [ Applause ] >>MR. ROD BECKSTROM: It's the final allocation T-shirt. [ Laughter ] That's it. You don't get any more. >>RAÚL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you. Thank you very much, Rod. I don't know how I will share this T-shirt with my colleagues from the other RIRs, but probably -- I will give one sleeve. Okay. Good morning, everybody. I am Raúl Echeberria. I'm the CEO of LACNIC, acting this year as the chairman of the Number Resource Organization, the organization in which all the regional Internet registries work together. As Rod has said before, the first week of February we were witness of the end of IPv4 addresses central pool administered by IANA. This event has been long awaited, and therefore comes as no surprise. However, the fact that it has been long anticipated doesn't diminish its importance. We are facing a technological moment of major significance in the history of the Internet. The regional Internet registries have worked for years preparing for this moment. We have worked long and hard and invested great effort in different IPv6 promotion and training activities, dialoguing with governments, with international organizations, and with our communities. Working in a participative and open manner, each region's community has promoted the policies it considered most appropriate at each time. For this reason, several regions have policies in force to ensure the availability of IPv4 addresses in the form of small allocations both to existing but also to newcomer -- to new entrants to the market. It is essential that those who have not yet done so immediately begin implementing measures for deploying IPv6 in their networks. All conditions are in place for a successful IPv6 transition. One that will not affect Internet growth or the services accessed by users. We are optimistic and hope for this result. The regional Internet registries and the Number Resource Organization, the organization that unites us, have worked and will continue to work with all our energies to make it happen in that way. Finally, this is a very appropriate moment to congratulate ourselves for the work that we have done. The validity of this multistakeholder, open, participative and democratic IP addresses administration system has been proven and it has been demonstrated that this is also the appropriate mechanism to deal with this new era of the Internet, the IPv6 time. It is also a good time for congratulating and thanking ICANN for the excellent work that they have done in performing the IANA functions and specifically the administration of the central pool of IPv4 addresses, with absolute responsibility. The NRO has been and continues being supportive of ICANN supporting the IANA functions and in this sense, the Number Resource Organization has sent a letter to ICANN regarding the recent NOI suggesting to look for a new model of agreement with the U.S. government in which the current contract can be substituted by a cooperative agreement consistent with what has been said earlier this morning and probably consistent with what many people in this community has in mind. Without any doubt, we are facing very interesting times. Thank you. [ Applause ] I think that it is my duty now to introduce the next speaker, Danny McPherson, a member of the Internet Architecture Board. Please. I don't have a T-shirt for you. [ Applause ] >>DANNY McPHERSON: No T-shirt, okay. So, yeah, if you don't believe the time has come, I don't even get a T-shirt, so -- [ Laughter ] -- so you'd best be paying attention, I guess. I'm Danny McPherson. I am an appointed member of the Internet Architecture Board, and a member of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee within ICANN, and my day job is with VeriSign, actually. So I'm just going to take a few brief moments because I'm standing between you and lunch and then I get to release you for lunch, so... So anyway, the -- you know, the amazing growth and development of the Internet over the past four decades is a testament to the success of the work done by many organizations. Amongst these is the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board, the bodies that develop the standards and protocols that the Internet is built upon, and of course ICANN, the body that coordinates unique and stable Internet identifiers. The final allocation of IPv4 addresses from the IANA to the RIRs is both significant and insignificant. The end of the beginning, if you will. This moment has long been anticipated, with the IETF's work on the successor to IPv4 having begun two decades ago. That successor, IPv6, was standardized nearly 15 years ago when ICANN was just in its infancy or just being conceived. The event is insignificant in that next month the Internet will be no different than it is -- than it was a month ago. There will be no noticeable short-term effects of IPv4 exhaustion at the IANA level, and the current IPv4-based network will continue to function as usual. However, in only a matter of months, the first of the RIRs is expected to run out of IPv4 addresses to allocate to customers, at which point only new IP addresses available on the Internet will be IPv6 addresses. Because IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses aren't what you call "bits on the wire compatible," when that happens, content or eyeballs will either need to be IPv6 accessible or some type of middle box or translation device will be required in order to transact between those systems. The sooner we all move to adopt IPv6, the more quickly we can minimize clumsy work-arounds, such as network address translators, application- level gateways and end-system hacks that add complexity to the system and compromise, in the end, transparency. A design principle that has contributed significantly to the success of the Internet. This is particularly important because the more end-to-end is challenged, the less agile and more constrained the Internet, as a platform for innovation, becomes. IPv6 makes available many more systems that end systems and applications can employ and removes address scarcity constraints that we've been working around for over a decade. The transition to IPv6 will not be without effort and requires attention of essentially all participants in the Internet ecosystem. The onus is now on network and access providers, content providers, light-handed government influence, as well as registry operators and registrars alike, to ensure that they've attained IPv6 preparedness levels that provide functional parity with IPv4 at both the network and the application level. The fundamental key to the Internet success is the unification of networks through global addressing within the namespace, the DNS, and within the number space, the IP addressing system. Preserving this through IPv6 adoption is fundamental to maintaining the potential of the Internet that we're aware of -- the creativity chaos, as Ira refers to it -- and, you know, the Internet that we've all become accustomed to. So with that, thank you, and I -- you know, I get to release you for lunch. So thank you very much. [ Applause ]