ICANN turns on next-gen IP addresses

The great migration from Internet Protocol version 4 to IPv6 has officially begun, after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers added the first addresses to its root servers that conform to the new version. On Monday, ICANN, which maintains the Internet’s addressing systems, said it had for the first time added IPv6 addresses to the appropriate files and databases on six of the world’s 13 root server networks–the systems containing the authoritative databases that form a master list of all top-level domain names. Before ICANN did this, those who were using IPv6 had no choice but to run it alongside IPv4, because the root server networks accommodated only IPv4.