American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is a nonprofit member-based organization who manages internet number resources throughout its designated service region. They coordinate the development of policies by the community for management of Internet Protocol number resources and advances the internet through informational outreach. They cover three areas and registration services is the area that deals with the allocation of IP address space, transfer and record maintenance.
The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) is one of the Internet’s oldest institutions with its activities dating back to the 1970’s. One specific task they have is to coordinate the global pool of IP and AS numbers providing them to Regional Internet Registries such as ARIN. ...view middle of the document...
I think the world is running out of IPv4 addresses because almost everyone has one device or more that require an IP address. Also, some companies requested more IP addresses than they needed and they are sitting dormant waiting to be used. According to some estimates the IPv4 addresses will be depleted sometime within this year. Other estimates suggest 2037 as the year of depletion. APNIC ran out of IP addresses on 4/15/2011, IANA ran out of IP addresses on 2/3/2013 and a third estimate says that ARIN will run out on 3/22/2015.
IPv6 has not gone mainstream yet because of Network Address Translation (NAT). NAT allows you to use a single IPv4 address for each office, regardless of the number of systems in the office, and also allows a network to have an IPv6 address outside the firewall. Many Internet service providers do not have a deadline for moving to IPv6 and some don’t even offer IPv6 addresses or services yet. Making the switch would require a software update and in some cases new hardware for some devices. Several of the older devices do not support IPv6 although some servers can support both IPv4 and IPv6 allowing the devices to talk to each other but it can contribute to the load on the server.
Companies that have unused IPv4 addresses can sell them for huge profit. ARIN states that IP addresses are not property and can only be transferred with their approval. ARIN wants to handle the transfer of IP addresses but the companies can negotiate a price suitable for the blocks of addresses.
Sources:
www.arin.net/about_us/overview.html
www.iana.org
www.apnic.net
http://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=348253&seqNum=7
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/whatis/ipv6-addresses-how-many-is-that-in-numbers/
http://www.howtogeek.com/
http://www.pcworld.com/
www.ipv4depletion.com
