The next era of the internet

In a recent interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Vint Cerf declared that the world will run out of ip addresses in just a few weeks. IP addresses are essential to the operations of the internet. This will mean that in the last couple decades that the internet has been running rampant, the world has used up 4.3 billion ip addresses. This causes a huge problem for nearly everyone who currently uses the internet. In order for the internet to continue functioning as it currently does, we're going to have to see a very quick and massive transition. The ip addresses that we're running out of are ip v4 addresses. What we'll have to see a transition to is ip v6 addresses. The ip v6 addresses will allow for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 total addresses (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20029318-93.html). This is actually a little bit easier than it sounds when you consider that if all the major companies transition, there will be plenty of v4 addresses left so that ordinary users can transition at a later date (presumably controlled by the ISP's). So now after many years of companies such as Google and Facebook harvesting and manipulating users and their data, it's time for these companies to do something for us. They need to coordinate together and ensure that this transition is seamless and essentially unseen by the everyday user.