33 Million New WWWs in 2007

"There were 33 million more domain names added to the Internet in 2007 as compared to 2006, with a total of 153 million domain names added in 2007," according to a new 'Domain Name Industry' report released by VeriSign. The highest growth was garnered by .com, followed by .de (Germany), then .net and .cn (China). Fifth spot was shared between .uk (United Kingdom) and .org, with .info and .eu (the European Union), .biz and .mobi appearing further down the list of the most registered domain names. Between .com and .net alone, there were more than 80.4 million domain name registrations by the end of 2007. The year also saw over 58 million CCTLD (country code Top Level Domain Names) registrations. As per a VeriSign statement, the company processed more than 33 billion domain name system (DNS) queries per day during the last quarter of 2007. So with such explosive growth, are we in danger of running out of names some day?
The VeriSign report (http://www.verisign.com/static/043379.pdf) estimates that new allocations of IPv4 addresses will run out in less than five years. However, we would do fine by adopting Internet Protocol version 6, it says.
Waxing eloquent about the benefits of adopting IPv6, the report reads: "IPv6 is a network layer protocol designed as the successor for IPv4, the current version of Internet Protocol used on the Internet today. IPv6 corrects some of the shortcomings of IPv4, and adds several new features that facilitate innovation and scaling of the Internet."
"One of the main changes that IPv6 enables is a larger address space that provides for greater flexibility in assigning addresses. Thus the adoption of IPv6 supports growth of the Internet in developing markets and the introduction of new Internet services. As a point of reference, IPv4 can support 4 billion addresses while IPv6 can support 3.4 1038 unique addresses which is approximately 5 1028 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today."Source