What Google and Facebook Are Doing to Push the IPv6 Switch

The dwindling number of IPv4 addresses and the very slow adoption of the newer IPv6 has been a problem for years, but things are only now starting to move in the right direction, even as addresses are expected to run out sometime this year. Google, Facebook and Yahoo, which now account for a big percentage of internet traffic are working together to promote World IPv6 Day.

It's more than just a marketing thing, all of them will be enabling IPv6 infrastructure on that day, which may lead to problems for a small minority of users.

Google and YouTube offer IPv6 versions

Google has been working on getting ready for IPv6 for several years now. The main search engine is accessible through a IPv6 address from ipv6.google.com. When YouTube introduced IPv6 support, traffic over the new protocol surged.

Google is also offering its services by default over IPv6 for ISPs that have made the switch, by using a whitelist of providers with native IPv6 connectivity.

When it comes to major websites, Google has been leading the switch to the new protocol, but that's understandable since the co-creator of the TCP/IP stack, Vint Cerf one of the people that have made the biggest contributions to the internet as we know it, has been working for the company since 2005 and spearheading efforts to get the infrastructure ready for the switch.

"In the short history of the Internet, the transition to IPv6 is one of the most important steps we will take together to protect the Internet as we know it. It's as if the Internet was originally designed with a limited number of telephone numbers, and we're soon going to run out," he explained.

Google has been keeping track of the IPv6 traffic reaching its servers and, while it has seen an accelerated growth in the past year, it's still a tiny fraction, 0.2 percent, of the traffic Google gets in a regular day.

Facebook's IPv6 address is 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

But Google is not alone in this, Facebook, undeniably one of the most popular and visited websites on the planet, has been offering a IPv6 version since summer through www.v6.facebook.com.

Interestingly, the IPv6 address of Facebook is 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3, the site is actually very proud of that.

"As a next generation protocol, IPv6 provides a vast number of addresses by today's standards — 4 billion times the number that are available under IPv4. Telecom carriers, ISPs, OS makers, hardware manufacturers, Web companies, and governments around the world are depending on IPv6 to continue growth of the Internet," Facebook's Donn Lee explained.