The European Commission last week proposed an action plan aimed at accelerating the EU’s transition to the sixth version of the Internet protocol (IPv6): the protocol introduces a new internet technology that will in effect render the number of websites unlimited and promote the development of mobile telephony of the third generation (3G). According to the Executive’s forecasts, if the present system which has been in force since the Seventies is not rapidly reformed, the risk of the saturation of the space of available Internet sites will become real already by 2005. The Protocol IPv4 “is no longer sufficient to guarantee that every inhabitant on the planet may possess his own Internet address”, said a spokesman of the Commission. The problem is aggravated by the unequal distribution of websites on the world level, three quarters of which belong to North America: just to give one example, the Commission has pointed out that “the American Universities of Stanford and MIT each possess more sites than the whole of China”. G.A.G.
