Photographer : Tegan Schetrumpf
While everyone is talking about mandatory ISP filtering, very few people are talking about the internet drought. Ask most young people and they’ll tell you the internet is infinite. According to our IT youth expert, Pascal Zajac, it’s a limited resource. He talks candidly about what’s happening online, why we’ve never heard of it, and what we can do about it.
I’m sure the first question on every young person’s mind is, how can we possibly be running out of internet?
To access the Internet, you need to have a unique number that identifies you; it’s basically like a phone number. Your number allows information to know where it’s supposed to go. Some people might remember a few years back when we had to add some extra digits to phone numbers in Australia because they were running out – the same thing is happening online.
When the Internet was first designed back in the 1970s, they came up with a number system that allowed for 4.2 billion unique numbers. It sounds huge, but then they made some stupid decisions, reserving large chunks for specific companies or purposes, so 4 billion became more like 2 billion. Now consider that every single website, house, laptop and even mobile phone that’s connected to the Internet needs its own number, and you can see why we’re running out.
Why haven’t we heard about the internet drought, and how long have we got before it becomes an obvious problem?
We haven’t heard about it because it’s not affecting us yet. We’ve come up with some incredibly clever tricks to extend the number, but we’re approaching a dead end. Experts across the world have agreed we have about 18 to 30 months left before numbers run out. After that, new businesses won’t be able to start a website, and people who don’t already have an Internet connection won’t be able to sign up for one.
What is the solution?
It depends who you ask. Some people have a vested interest in this topic, because as numbers dry up, those reserved numbers are going to become hugely valuable and sell for a lot of money.
The real solution is called IPv6, which is a new version of the underlying system that drives the Internet. People realised quite a while ago that this drought was going to happen, so they started working on a new version, and they finalised it in 1999. The new version allows for a LOT more unique numbers: about 79 billion billion billion. IPv6 will also make online life a bit easier and faster, and it’s completely backwards compatible, that is, all the programs and websites which work now will work on IPv6.
The problem is that there are literally billions of internet-accessing devices across the world that don’t support IPv6. This is because the companies who make them have decided IPv6 isn’t worthwhile to them yet. If we were to try and switch over to IPv6 tomorrow, we’d all discover our mobile phones no longer connected, and most of our desktop computers wouldn’t either.
Which countries are taking action on the internet drought?
Japan leads the world, offering tax incentives to their companies to be IPv6 ready, and they’ve been pushing for IPv6 since the mid 90s. China has unveiled a 5 year cross-over plan. The US got all their federal government agencies switched to IPv6 by the middle of 2008.
Australia is finally starting to pay some attention, with AARNET, (the main network that connects all of the Universities in Australia) establishing a new IPv6 backbone. Internode, a South Australian internet provider, is offering full IPv6 service to its customers.
What can young people do about it?
The big problem with IPv6 adoption is that nobody seems to care as long as things keep working for now. It’s a very short-sighted approach. The best way to send a message is to hit these companies where it hurts – the next time you go to buy a mobile phone, if it doesn’t have IPv6 support, don’t buy it. Get in touch with Stephen Conroy, the federal minister for IT, and ask him if the 197,000 laptops they’re going to roll out to schools next year are going to support IPv6.
Start asking your local and state governments, do they have a plan in place? What are they doing about making schools and government departments use the technology? Do they think about it when they buy new computers for parliament? If enough people start asking these questions, we might just get some answers, and we might still get to use Facebook in 2011.
