new top level domains

[Peter Murray]

On Wed, 11 Jun 1997 07:55:11 -0700 jul at oclc.org (Jul,Erik) wrote:
> Perhaps new TLDs are needed to handle the crush of demand for IP addresses.
>  New "number spaces" are needed.  That could be, but this solution seems to
> provoke more questions than it answers.

That is not the motivation.  To handle the demand for IP addresses, the IETF
moving the Internet towards "IPv6" (formerlly called "IP, the Next
Generation").  At some point (and in a gradual introduction), IP addresses
will move from their current 32 bits to 128 bits.  Here is a description of
the addressing changes from "IP Next Generation Overview"
http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/INET-IPng-Paper.html:

  IPng supports addresses which are four times the number of bits as IPv4 
  addresses (128 vs. 32). This is 4 Billion times 4 Billion (2^^96) times 
  the size of the IPv4 address space (2^^32). This works out to be: 

    340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 

  This is an extremely large address space. In a theoretical sense this is 
  approximately 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter 
  of the surface of the planet Earth (assuming the earth surface is 
  511,263,971,197,990 square meters). 

Other things are coming with IPv6, such as additional headers, Quality of
Service parameters (to give real-time traffic, say video or audio, more
priority over non-interactive traffic, say mail or usenet), and additonal
routing features.

I'm pretty sure what is supposed to happen is that the address field the
existing DNS structure will be expanded to use the new 128-bit addresses but
the domain names themselves will stay the same.  So whether the IP address of
that web server out there is an IPv4 or an IPv6 address, if you use the same
domain name (and the underlying software can handle the new addresses)
everything will behave just the same.  That clause in parenthesis is a big
"if", of course (I know some of the software I've written over the years will
break), but we have time to work that out.

For more info on IPv6, check out:
   http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/ipng-main.html
   http://www.6bone.net/


Peter
--
Peter Murray, Library Systems Manager                      pem at po.cwru.edu
Digital Media Services                   http://www.cwru.edu/home/pem.html
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio            W:216-368-5888