Also in March, Google published a manifesto on its public policy blog explaining . 

Google's experience with IPv6 is significant because only a handful of have embraced the next-generation Internet protocol. 

The IETF created IPv6 in 1995 as a replacement to the existing version of the Internet Protocol, known as IPv4.

IPv6 is needed because the Internet is . IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support approximately 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size.

Experts predict IPv4 addresses will be gone by 2012. At that point, all ISPs, government agencies and corporations will need to support IPv6 on their backbone networks.