On May 20^th the Office of the US President released a new planning guide for US Government agency adoption of the Internet Protocol, version 6 (IPv6).  As the world's largest IT user, once the US Government finally starts moving ahead on a project, the rest of the world will finally need to take some serious notice.

IPv4 addresses are the machine language which tells Internet-connected applications how to find each other throughout the global network of networks.  Humans are familiar with names such as www.yahoo.com, however Internet applications and routing devices would see the same thing as 209.131.36.158.

The problem is that Internet Protocol, version 4 (IPv4) address space is nearly exhausted, with less than 15% of available address space remaining (of 4,294,967,296 total available IPv4 addresses).  Some experts, such as Paul Wilson (Dir Asia-Pacific Network Information Center) believe IPv4 addresses will start to dry up as soon as soon as June 2011.