A Chinese, Russian plot to control the Internet?

June 8: The United States and Israel- jointly attacking Iran's nuclear program- not with bombs but with computer viruses. It is a new kind of secret warfare uncovered in a new book. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

By Bob Sullivan

Has the U.S. government been caught with its virtual hands in the world's cookie jar? And might it lose control of the Internet as a consequence?

If you were among the forces on planet wanting to wrest control of the Internet from the U.S.-friendly agencies that manage it, that's the story you'd surely want to tell. 

But things are rarely what they seem.  The barrage of Flame news – including word that Flame and Stuxnet appear to have common authorship -- should not be viewed in a vacuum.

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A group of nations led by China, Russia and several Middle Eastern countries would love to see the end of U.S. dominance over the operational control of the Internet, and these nations think they have found their vehicle for accomplishing that: A U.N. body called the International Telecommunications Union.

The organization, which manages international telephony agreements, will meet in Dubai in December and attempt to extend its charter to take operational control of the Internet away from the U.S.-dominated nonprofit International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. 

Even as news of Flame first hit, an ITU working group was meeting in Geneva to finalize the agenda for the Dubai meeting. At almost the same time, there was a hearing in an obscure congressional subcommittee where experts rang alarm bells about an ITU coup.

The argument that the U.S. should not be in a position of power as far as overseeing the Internet will be bolstered by a world set aflame by news that the U.S. may have exploited its technological advantage to attack sovereign nations with Flame and Stuxnet.

Some technology experts say the Dubai meeting could very well decide the direction of the world's most valuable resource - information - for the rest of the 21st century:   The future of Internet anonymity, free speech and perhaps freedom itself could be at stake.

"I think there is a political story that is being missed here," said Chris Bronk, a former State Department official who worked in that agency’s Office of eDiplomacy and is now a professor at Rice University. "There's much more to this. … Stuxnet was better than bombs in the short run, but this could hurt the U.S. down the road.”

Conspiracy theorists -- including several interviewed for this story who requested that their comments remain off the record -- point out that the world learned about Flame from a Moscow-based antivirus company (Kaspersky Labs), and the ITU chose Flame as the subject of its first-ever international cyber-warning, claiming for the first time an important role in cybersecurity affairs.  They see the grand publicity surrounding Flame as little more than a power grab by the ITU in advance of the Dubai meeting, dubbed the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).

“If you want to be cynical, this is definitely a play by an international group to try to gain control over arguably the world’s most valuable resource,” said Paul Rohmeyer, a Stevens Institute of Technology professor who specializes in cybersecurity and international issues, and one of the few members of the conspiracy camp willing to connect the dots publicly.

But you don't have to draw such a direct connection to see the relationship between Flame and ITU's desire to find and flex new power. Kaspersky Labs, the Russian firm that continues to publish the most informative details about Flame, has a solid reputation in the security research world, and there’s no reason to believe it is acting on behalf of Russian national interests. Still, it's impossible not to view Flame -- and recent revelations about Stuxnet -- without understanding the diplomatic backdrop.

“If I were advising Russia, I would be all over the place waving these stories around,” said Eneken Tikk, formerly the legal and policy advisor for NATOs Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre in Estonia.  “It seems like a great opportunity to increase pressure on talks around cyber threats to international peace and security and gather a coalition of potential victims to say, ‘We see the U.S. establishing itself on the Net in offensive way, we need an international umbrella to do something.’”

If the U.S. is guilty of escalating cyberwar by writing computer code that disabled critical Iranian computers, there is no question that forces around the globe will try to exploit the news to their own ends. While most analysts have focused on the potential that Flame invites other countries to counterattack the U.S. with similar cyber-bombs, the real threat might be the rationale it could provide for ending the free-flow of information around the Web.

“It's very concerning from a purely political standpoint. You can see why a group like ITU would be incentivized to release this news,” Rohmeyer said. “I’m guessing that's what they are trying to set up. They are building their case for internationalization. They have everything to gain and the established order, which is U.S.-based, has everything to lose.”

U.S. officials aren't blind to the threat; they've made very public warnings about it. In February, Federal Communications Commission member Robert McDowell wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal where he criticized the ITU:

"The most lethal threat to Internet freedom may not come from a full frontal assault, but through insidious and seemingly innocuous expansions of intergovernmental powers," he wrote. "Scores of countries led by China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others, have pushed for, as then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said almost a year ago, 'international control of the Internet' through the ITU."

McDowell also testified before that congressional subcommittee on May 31, and warned that "pro-regulation" forces led by China and Russia are far more organized than U.S. allies.

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"While precious time ticks away, the U.S. has not named a leader for the treaty negotiation," he said.

Some in Congress were even more blunt:

“If we're not vigilant, just might break the Internet," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.

The dire-sounding warnings aren't coming solely from U.S. government officials, either.  Even the so-called “father of the Internet,” Vint Cerf, expressed grave concern that day in Congress.

“(The Dubai meeting) holds profound—and I believe potentially hazardous— implications  for the future of the Internet and all of its users," he testified. "If all of us do not pay attention to what is going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many.”

Nor is the alarm coming just from the U.S. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, president of Estonia, rang alarm bells on Friday during the International Conference on Cyber Conflict in Tallinn.

“The outcome of (the Dubai meeting), and related processes, will help determine the topography of the Web for the next two decades,” he said. “While this conference may fall into the domain of ministries of commerce and communications, make no mistake, there will be major cybersecurity ramifications. More ominously, we will face calls to limit free expression as we know it on the Web today.”

But as Western nations try to draw battle lines, the reality of Flame and Stuxnet muddies the argument considerably.  The U.S. risks losing moral high ground through stories about such cyberattacks.

"When we had plausible deniability for Stuxnet, we could make the argument more easily,” Bronk said. “This completely cuts at the knees the Internet freedom agenda.  How can the U.S. use clandestine cyberattack to go after a threatening regime, and then push the free agenda? "

As Rohmeyer sees it, the combination of U.S. cyberattacks and the Dubai meeting puts the Internet at “an age-old crossroads.”

What might change mean?
The ITU has its roots in an organization created during the 1860s to standardize cross-border telegraph traffic in Europe. It became a U.N. body after World War II, focused almost entirely on simplifying international telephony. Only recently has it tried to extend its charter to Internet traffic, most notably with the creation of an agency called The International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats, or IMPACT, based in Kuala Lumpur. Modeled after national computer emergency response teams, IMPACT’s stated mission is to share time-critical computer vulnerability and virus information around the globe. The U.S. has so far refused to join ITU’s IMPACT. Russia, China, Iran and about 140 other nations are members.  

IMPACT tried to take the lead in international dissemination of information about Flame, using the virus as cause for its first-ever warning.

How might ITU change the way the Internet works? No one knows, of course, but there are obvious reasons for concern.  Chinese officials have repeated stated they want an Internet where users must register by IP address, effectively ending anonymity and, perhaps, Internet-based uprisings. 

McDowell warns that Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan asked the U.N. General Assembly to create an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security” to mandate “international norms and rules standardizing the behavior of countries concerning information and cyberspace.”  Even  ITU’s head of corporate strategy, Alexander Ntoko, raised eyebrows  earlier this year in Cancun when he predicted that anonymity online would end.

“Why countries are interested in the ITU varies. … China and Russia, their motivations are not very friendly to human rights or openness,” said Cynthia Wong, a lawyer for Center for Technology and Democracy. “Other places feel like they don't have a voice in the current process. “

One of the main criticisms of the process is a lack of transparency and the limitations on participation of non-governmental groups, according to complaints publicized but the Center for Technology and Democracy and human rights groups.  But it’s clear the ITU plans new ways to raise revenue, which might lead to some form of a per-click tax, according to witnesses who testified before Congress at that May 31 hearing.  wong also expects the ITU to push for mandatory standards for packet delivery – Net standards have been voluntary so far -- which could be a precursor for giving nations more control over incoming and outgoing Internet traffic at their borders.

One state, one vote
“Part of the problem with ITU process is that it's so opaque, so it is really hard to understand what might be at stake,” Wong said.  “But what we do know is Russia and some of the Arab states have put cybersecurity on the table.  There are proposals for greater regulation of traffic routing for security purposes.  Depending on how such regulations are implemented, it could be used to justify greater intrusions on privacy and fundamentally change how the Internet currently works technically.”

In other words, such proposals would make it easier for nations to control Internet traffic.

Practically speaking, it will be difficult for ITU to grab control over the central tool governing the Web – the domain name system – in Dubai. That system is currently operated by ICANN. But a sizable block of non-U.S. countries agreeing to mandatory routing standards could still wield considerable power. Treaty negotiations are one state, one vote. The U.S. government could make a reservation with something in the treaty, but if ITU standards become mandatory, all Internet users could be impacted. One potential outcome would see a “splitting” of the Internet, where traffic from nations following one standard is denied by a bloc of nations following another.

But Wong’s chief concern currently is that groups like hers aren’t welcome in the proceedings. On May 17, the Center for Democracy and Technology and 20 other non-governmental agencies from around the world sent a letter of protest to Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré, who is running the meeting, saying “there has been scant participation by civil society” in the run-up to Dubai.  But Wong thinks the influential Internet protests around SOPA demonstrate that no government agency will be able to pull a fast one on a recently empowered digital constituency.

“One of the lessons you can pull from SOPA is this: The time when governments can go behind closed doors and make important decisions about how we use the Internet is gone. That’s not acceptable anymore,” she said. “There is a community of users who are paying attention, and are really concerned about the future of the Internet. They are not going to find it acceptable anymore to use these old ways of creating laws. And it behooves governments involved in this to pay attention to that.” To that end, several groups have collaborated to create WCITLeaks.org, to encourage anonymous uploading of conference-related documents.

The experience of SOPA might make the Flame and Stuxnet sagas even more important. Could the potential for Internet users to rise up against U.N. control of the Net be blunted if the alternative seems to be continued control by the U.S., its image damaged by Flame and Stuxnet?  Rohmeyer thinks so: Like many technology experts, he’s skeptical of claims that Flame is the most powerful virus ever created. As others have pointed out, Flame is so large that it’s clearly not designed for stealth operation – whoever created it almost begged for it to be found. He thinks a big part of the publicity around Flame is a function of this battle for control of the Net.

“Is the U.S. releasing viruses so powerful that it needs to lose its control of the Internet?” he said. “I don't think by itself the release of Flame rises to threshold. I’m dubious of is effectiveness, and suspicious of those claims.” 

There are also open questions about ITU’s ability to take operational control over the Internet and cybersecurity.

'No country is an island on the Internet'
“The ITU has been kind of like one big group hug,” said Rohmeyer.  “Do U.N. groups have a track record of success with this kind of operation? The ITU was a standard-setting body for telephony. Once you move out of the connectivity realm into operational controls – wow! That gives them an enormous amount of power. ICANN seems to be functioning. When I woke up this morning, the Internet seemed to be working. I don’t think (ITU) has been in this business before.”

Not everyone in the U.S. is against giving ITU more control over cyberspace.  Jody Westby, who launched the Central Intelligence Agency’s famed In-Q-Tel technology investment arm and is now a highly sought-after U.S. cyberexpert, penned a column for Forbes last week strongly endorsing U.S. participation in IMPACT.

“No country is an island on the Internet, and the U.S. cannot expect to be able to adequately respond to cyberattacks or malware infiltrations without the input and involvement of others around the globe,” said Westby, who disclosed that IMPACT was previously a client of her consultancy firm. “The U.S.’s ‘our way or the highway’ attitude in the important area of cybersecurity appears petulant.”

She also said that, absent U.S. participation, other nations will look to Russia and China for leadership.

“The U.S. appears as the shirking nation state quietly standing on the sidelines while being accused of engaging in cyberwarfare tactics,” she said.

But Rohmeyer was was among those who wondered aloud what was in it for the U.S.

“There is no upside for the U.S. (in participation),” he said. “Is the Internet going to be managed better? Will it be more open?”

Many experts think the end result of Dubai will mean the already tense balance between bottom-up governance, where private firms dictate policy through collaboration, and top-down governance, where governments mandate Internet policies, will grow even more stressed. So will the tension between anonymity, free speech and U.S.-friendly control on one side, they say, vs. accountability, control, and Chinese/Russian/Arab interests on the other. McDowell, from the FCC, has repeatedly warned that even a positive outcome for the U.S. in Dubai offers little reason to celebrate. 

“Given the high profile, not to mention the dedicated efforts by some countries, I cannot imagine that this matter will disappear,” he testified before Congress. “Similarly, I urge skepticism for the ‘minor tweak’ or ‘light touch.’ As we all know, every regulatory action has consequences.”

Phillip Hallam-Baker, writing in the online magazine CircleID, compared the balancing act to the uneasy management of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where power is shared awkwardly among various Christian groups and squabbles are common.

“Backing ICANN appears to be the only sensible course for the U.S. But the problem with this approach is that the U.S. cannot risk ICANN itself being captured by hostile powers, and that in turn means that the U.S. cannot ever release its de facto control of ICANN,” he wrote. “It is an inherently unstable situation that is only maintained through constant vigilance on all sides. “

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Peliculas Online

Here comes the greatest Internet landgrab in history

ICANN tomorrow will reveal who is going after what new domain extensions, paving the way for a very different looking Web. Prepare for dot-madness.

Frank Schilling is betting big on new domain extensions.

(Credit: Frank Schilling)

Frank Schilling made his fortune in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, buying up thousands of domain names others didn't want. He kept at it, aggressively building a portfolio of more than 320,000 domains that, through a combination of ads and outright sales, have made Schilling a decamillionaire many times over.

Now the 43-year-old domainer is going after what he sees as a far bigger opportunity. He's put up $60 million of his own money to stake his claim on a giant, emerging piece of the Internet -- the opening up of so-called generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, to include pretty much anything. The king of all domain extensions -- .com -- is under attack as never before.

"This is absolutely the future," says Schilling, whose new venture, Uniregistry.com, has applied to run 54 new top-level-domains. "We're at this point where the dot-com name space -- the entire name space -- is exhausted."

It's a massive, six-year-long undertaking that has the potential to radically reshape the landscape of the Internet. By the end of the year, we could begin to see companies branding things very differently. Canon has said it plans to ditch Canon.com in favor or using .Canon. Google could use Movies.YouTube. And you, dear frustrated domain-buying consumer, could eventually find it a whole lot easier to register a domain name you want without having to pay fat prices that Schilling and his ilk demand on the aftermarket.

It's not just the hard-core denizens of the domain world that are going after new TLDs, which are also known as "strings." Others are jumping into the fray. The most intriguing is Google, which in late May revealed that it's applying for an undisclosed number of strings, including .Google, .YouTube, .docs, and .lol. ("Despite the great opportunities the Web has enabled for people around the world, there is still a lingering question about the diversity of the domain space," Google's chief Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf, wrote in a blog post).

Demand Media, whose business includes Go Daddy competitor eNom, has said it's spending $18 million to go after 26 strings. And a number of lesser-known companies are competing -- some of which, like Schilling's new business, have sprung up specifically to participate in this digital landgrab.

"We've made more than $100 million in bets," says Dan Schlinder, a co-founder of Donuts.co, which raised venture capital money to go after 307 strings that it won't reveal before tomorrow. (Notice that the new company's name sits on a .co and not a .com. Why? Because Donuts.com is a parked site owned by a domainer who wanted far more than Shlinder and his team would pay).

Avoiding land mines
All told, these companies have applied for 1,900 stings. Yet even after tomorrow's big reveal, as it's known, a whole lot of messy work awaits. Brands such as Google will simply get their TLDs because it's their trademark. Other claimed brand names will surely lead to disputes, Even countries can protest names.

"It's going to be a minefield fraught with delays," predicts Schindler.

Then there's the overlap problem. Here's an example: Both Schilling and Google want .lol, as might others. Schilling also wants .home, which is also on Go Daddy's shopping list. And that's just two. Collisions will doubtless occur on many of the best generic names: .music, .free, .cars, .game, and on and on to dot who-knows-what.

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman is skeptical of all the new domain extensions.

(Credit: James Martin)

This is hardly surprising. Choosing strings, like speculating on domain names, includes a bit of instinct, but it's far from random. Donuts.co., for instance, used proprietary software to help it come up with its list, examining 25 parameters that include popular search phrases on Google as well as keyword bidding trends.

All this will lead to months of backroom negotiations. ICANN is asking those involved to try to work out deals. Only when that fails will ICANN hold an auction for the names. Presumably, the big shots like Google will get what they want, but not necessarily. The smaller firms could, for instance, try to team up with a competitor or bring on more investors.

"We may have to fold on some of these," says Schilling, "but we'll try to take them all to auction."

Even after this all shakes out, with much of it stretching into 2013, these new registries will have a ton of work and deal making to do. Think about it. Of the 22 gTLDs already out there, most are shadows of the giant that is .com, which now claims more than 100 million domain names. Who do you know who uses .pro or .museum?

"We've been living in a .com world since the dawn of the Internet," says Warren Adelman, the CEO of Go Daddy, which in addition to .home, also applied for .casa and .GoDaddy. "Whenever you're doing something other than .com, it's kind of swimming upstream."

Struggle for shelf space
Which is why all these new players will want Adelman's help making that arduous swim. Go Daddy, after all, sells more than half of the domain name registrations in the world. So while these new registries will be technically allowed to sell names directly to consumers, acting also as the registrar, they're going to need partnerships and marketing help to get any attention.

"There's going to be a struggle for shelf space," says Schindler.

Just look at the fastest-growing new TLD on the scene, .co. Entrepreneur Juan Diago Calle worked tirelessly to land a contract with the government of Colombia to commercialize the country's TLD -- beating out Verisign for the contract -- and then proceeded to spend millions marketing the extension.

He's advertising heavily across the Web, has sponsored many events, and struck a partnership with Go Daddy. The two even advertised together in the last two Super Bowls. The result is that .CO Internet, which launched to the public in July 2010, now claims 1.3 million registrations and is a profitable company.

"Many of the companies involved in this are simply hoping that Go Daddy will add their TLD into its store and they'll sell millions the next day," said Calle, who is going after 13 new TLDs through the investment company that backed .co Internet. " That's what they are betting on, but it won't be the case."

The other bet is that big, known brands will do the marketing for all these new domain extensions, creating consumer awareness via ads on TV, outdoor billboards, and elsewhere. If enough companies start promoting their companies on their own extensions -- imagine Drive.BMW or Run.Nike -- the hope is that will shift attention to a world other than .com. Then, when a restaurant needs a Web site, for example, it won't need WeHaveGreatFood.com, but instead will go for WeHaveGreatFood.Restaurant.

To Schilling, who's based in the Cayman Islands, this all resembles the mid-1990s, when big companies started promoting their brands on .com names, seeding the idea that .com was the premium name for all businesses and, ultimately, individuals.

Perhaps. But such a shift will likely take years, or even decades. Along the way, many new domain extensions will likely fail, unforeseen problems will arise, and speculators will find ways to make money off those TLDs that gain traction. Unlike when Schilling started out, however, one thing is very different: No one is dismissing the Internet as over.

Peliculas Online

Internet powers flip the IPv6 switch (FAQ)

The time for testing is over as Facebook, Cisco, Comcast, and others will soon permanently enable next-generation Internet technology with vastly more elbow room. What's it all mean?

(Credit: Internet Society)

What began as a 24-hour test a year ago will become business as usual on Wednesday as a range of big-name Internet companies permanently switch on the next-generation IPv6 networking technology.

And now there's no turning back.

"IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.

Internet Protocol version 6 has one big improvement over the prevailing IPv4 standard it's designed to supplant: room to grow. However, moving to IPv6 isn't simple, which is why many organizations on the Internet have banded together for Wednesday's World IPv6 Launch event overseen by a standards and advocacy group called theInternet Society.

In practice, IPv6 has been gradually arriving on the Net already, and there's a long way to go after the event. But the launch day is a real milestone. Here's a look at some of the issues involved.

Why all the IPvWhatever fuss?
Because the Internet is running out of room.

Today, IPv4 is used to describe the network address to almost all smartphones, PCs, servers, and Internet-enabled refrigerators so that other devices can exchange data. For example, your computer needs to know the IP address of CNET News to read this story, and CNET's server needs to know your computer's IP address to send the Web page information to it.

IPv4, though, offers only 4.3 billion addresses (2 to the 32nd power, or 4,294,967,296, to be precise). That may sound like a lot, but there are ever more devices to connect to the Internet, and many of the IPv4 addresses are inaccessibly squirreled away by organizations that got large tracts of them earlier in the history of the Internet.

The upshot is that the problem called IPv4 address exhaustion is real: the pipeline of new ones is emptying out. That's a problem for businesses that want to set up new Internet services or for carriers wanting to sell another few million smartphones.

IPv6 to the rescue! It offers 340 undecillion addresses (2 to the 128th power, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, to be precise).

There's only one problem: Upgrading the Internet to IPv6 -- and that means the entire Internet -- is expensive, requires a lot of work, and is something most of the computing industry has been putting off until absolutely necessary. There are still procrastinators, but its time now has come.

The Federal Communications Commission shows the relative size of the IPv6 address space enabled by the longer Internet addresses.

(Credit: FCC)

How real is IPv6?
You've been able to create IPv6 networks since 1999, but there's been little point until relatively recently. Many people didn't have computers, home networking equipment, or Internet service providers that could reach IPv6 sites on the Net, and Web sites had little incentive to make their sites available over IPv6.

But that's changing now.

Come Wednesday, somebody with an IPv6 connection will be able to get data from an IPv6 Internet site. The fraction of Internet traffic will be small but then will grow fast. Yahoo properties that will become IPv6-enabled Wednesday includethe main Yahoo.com Web site, My Yahoo, and OMG.

"For the IPv6-enabled sites, I expect to see roughly half a percent," said Jason Fesler, Yahoo's IPv6 evangelist. "In a year, in the realm of 10 to 15 percent."

Through a partnership called Atlas, Arbor Networks scrutinizes anonymous data from 253 Internet service providers, 125 of which carry IPv6 traffic today. Arbor has measured a flow of 10 gigabits per second of IP traffic flowing, said product manager Scott Iekel-Johnson. That's 0.04 percent of the total Internet traffic on Atlas, and 0.09 percent of the traffic on the IPv6-carrying ISPs, he said.

Hurricane Electric, a networking company that's been pushing IPv6 technology and services for more than a decade, is seeing the evidence that the shift to IPv6 is real. "Hurricane Electric's professional services group has seen a more than fivefold increase in people wanting us to provide courses and consulting to help them plan and deploy IPv6 over the last two months," said Owen DeLong, the company's IPv6 evangelist and director of professional services.

And based on its Internet monitoring, Cisco predicts "there will be 8 billion IPv6-capable fixed and mobile devices in 2016, up from 1 billion in 2011," the company said this week. "Globally, 40 percent of all fixed and mobile networked devices will be IPv6-capable in 2016, up from 10 percent in 2011."

Cisco Fellow Mark Townsley said IPv6 support is arriving at the two ends of the network connection, and that will push ISPs and other network companies to add their own support so the IPv6 connection actually can be made

"On the content side, we're seeing 50, 60, or 70 percent of content available over IPv6 available by year end," he said. And though Windows XP doesn't have IPv6 support by default, Townsley said, it'll fade from the scene. "The good news is, while 30 to 40 percent of PCs that don't have IPv6 by default, in the next two years, that's dropping down to fractional numbers -- 1 to 2 percent." Android and iOS devices, along with newer versions of Windows and OS X, already have IPv6 support.

Hurricane Electric has seen steadily increasing IPv6 traffic well before the official World IPv6 Launch event.

(Credit: Hurricane Electric)

Why do we need this World IPv6 Launch event then?
It'll add some pretty high-profile commitments to the transition, making it abundantly clear to laggards that they'd better get with the program. Among changes coming on Wednesday:

• Some ISPs will turn on IPv6 and leave it on so at least 1 percent of their customers will have IPv6 access. Those ISPs include AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Free Telecom, Internode, KDDI, and XS4ALL.

• Home network device makers Cisco and D-Link will enable IPv6 by default for their home network devices. Cisco makes the Netgear line of home routers.

• Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo will enable IPv6 access to their main Web sites and keep it available. Yahoo also committed to offer Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Finance over IPv6 in coming months. Several services already are available over IPv6 today, but people must go to a specific and different Web address such as ipv6.google.com. Now just going to google.com will return results over IPv6 if it's possible for the person doing the search to communicate with IPv6.

In practice, the IPv6 launch -- a transition that's been under way for years and that will take years more to complete -- has already begun.

Indeed, even the immediate run up to the IPv6 launch event has increased IPv6 content and corresponding network traffic, Hurricane Electric statistics show.

"The trend leading up to launch day is more likely people turning it on for launch day a little early in order to test and verify things and really be ready for leaving it on as of launch day," DeLong said. "There's no penalty on launch day for having turned it on early, so I think you're seeing people run tests in preparation for launch day. Since they aren't encountering problems when the test, they go ahead and leave the test running."

French ISP Free has been an aggressive adopter of IPv6 networking.

(Credit: Free)

Can't we just fix IPv4?
There are crutches to ease the problem. The biggest one is sharing a single IP address among several devices. If you have a home Wi-Fi network, chances are it's sharing its IP address with your computers, mobile phones, game consoles, Net-connected TVs and set-top boxes, and other network-savvy electronics.

This approach is called network address translation, or NAT. It's your Wi-FI router's job to be the traffic cop that oversees outgoing data sent from all these devices and directs incoming traffic to the appropriate device.

One real-world analogy to NAT is a street with 10 addresses. When somebody builds a six-unit apartment building at 8 Elm Street, that street address can be shared by the residents of 8A, 8B, 8C, 8D, 8E, and 8F Elm Street. Another analogy is phone extensions: a company can have a single phone number that leads to 10,000 extensions for individual employees.

On a grander scale, a similar concept exists called carrier-grade NAT, or CGN. This takes place at the Internet service provider level rather than the house level, and it's a lot more complicated.

Great -- with NAT, problem solved, right?
Yes and no. NAT has been a huge help in extending the life of IPv4 while the industry gets its IPv6 act together, but it brings its own problems.

Chief among them is that NAT breaks the ideal network model that a device has an actual address that naturally makes it easy to locate on the Net. NAT obscures addresses, which for some security purposes can be convenient, but for data transfer is a pain.

Here's how John Curran, chief executive of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), puts it:

The Internet is built on the "end to end" principle; i.e. the ability of one device to directly reach the other end of the connection. Network address gateways, while functional, do not preserve this property and as a result some applications have problems working reliably through them. This has been proven in the use of NAT in the home marketplace, which has resulted in numerous workarounds being deployed to make games and always-on Internet devices (like cameras and picture frames) work reliably.

Basically, NAT means there are first-class citizens on the network with their own addresses and second-class citizens that are harder to reach. That creates a hierarchy in which services must be designed around a relatively small number of central servers rather than enabling direct communication between any device.

Here's an example DeLong uses to show the shortcomings of NAT:

Today, remote scheduling of a recording on TiVO involves putting the scheduling request into the TiVO web site and TiVO's servers wait for your TiVO to "phone home" and pull down that request, so, your TiVO box is constantly having to check in with TiVO central and if your request is coming up in the next few minutes, it might not actually get communicated to the box. (There's generally about a 2 hour delay in this process in my experience).

Without NAT, there's no reason that you couldn't use an app. to send that request directly to your own TiVO box without even involving TiVO central. Even if it still goes through TiVO central, they could push the request out to the TiVO box instead of waiting for the TiVO box to "call in."

Adds Richard Jimmerson, the Internet Society's director for deployment and operationalization, carrier-grade NAT (CGG) also is likely to add delays called latency in Internet communications:

IPv4 address sharing through CGN requires additional devices and software be placed into use between the user and the content they interact with on the Internet. Early testing has shown this increases latency times for users, slowing down response times between their home and the content they are consuming. In some cases this degraded performance will be acceptable to the user, but in other cases it may not. Some latency-sensitive applications -- such as video streaming, IP based voice services, and online gaming -- may be severely impacted.

So NAT, while useful, is in many ways just a technology to tide people over until IPv6 arrives.

Will there be any trouble come Wednesday?
For a small slice of people, yes, but for the vast majority, no.

Last year's World IPv6 Day detailed that there are problems in a few corner cases, but generally that enabling IPv6 services didn't break the Internet.

Yahoo, which participated in the test and has gargantuan Web traffic, has carefully measured the fraction of its visitors who had problems when IPv6 is enabled. "Weeks before the World IPv6 Day 2011, it was roughly 0.055 percent," Fesler said. "A week after, that number was down to 0.022 percent, with a great number of people learning their systems were 'broken' and taking steps to fix it."

However, the problems have been creeping back, even though people might not know it. "Since last year, we've seen a steady rise back towards 0.030 percent. Since few Web sites have been running IPv6, these users have had no reason to realize anything was wrong."

What's actually going wrong?
For that small fraction, the problem is often within a particular user's grasp, Fesler said:

Most of the issues are local to the user's computer, or the user's home network. The problems may be related to the home wireless router they have - a few early IPv6 implementations did things that were ultimately found to not be in the customer's best interest. Many of these early implementations have updates available.

In other cases, it may be related to the home computer. IPv6 might be enabled in the house -- but the firewall installed on the home computer may not be aware of IPv6 (and block the traffic). Or the customer may have enabled specific transitional technology that allows IPv4-only users to have an IPv6 address using public gateways. These public gateways have no service level agreements; it is often impossible for an end user to know there may be a problem.

Other problems outside a person's control can crop up as IPv6 and IPv4 coexist side by side, with gateway devices trying to bridge between the two. That could show up as slow access to some sites.

For example, a person at home whose ISP assigned an IPv4 address, could try to reach an IPv4-based Web site. But the route in between might require IPv6, in which case hardware would have to wrap up the IPv4 data in IPv6, deliver it to the other side, then unwrap it for delivery to the other computer. That would have to be repeated for each packet of data sent in either direction, slowing network performance and increasing complexity.

Do I have a problem?
To see if you're affected, try anIPv6 readiness test site. Yahoo's IPv6 help site offers not just a test, but also advice steps to fix things.

Japan in particular has some problems, Yahoo said. That's because some ISPs have deployed IPv6 to let their subscribers access particular services such as phone and television that aren't part of the broader Internet, Fesler said. Traffic to the regular Internet uses IPv4.

That's all well and good -- except that the design fools browsers into thinking IPv6 is available for the Internet when in fact it's only available for a walled garden. That means sluggish Web performance as browsers attempt to connect over IPv6 wait before falling back to IPv4. "There is a roughly 1 second delay for Windows users, before giving up on IPv6 and trying IPv4 instead," Fesler said. "This problem is not just for the connection to the Web site, but also for connections to get images on the page and other resources needed to fully draw the Web site."