Pondering the significance of the Internet ’ s becoming “ full, ” I was interested in seeing a map of the global address space. Indeed in the long history of cartography, of world maps going back to the Greeks, Westphalian, and Mercatur projections, and medieval Islamic geographies like Muhammad al-Adrisi ’ s Tabula Rogerina, would the cosmogram of a now-full IPv4 address space perhaps compare on some small level? I was surprised, then, that was readily available. So in collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputing Center, Sam Kronick and I made one to satisfy our curiosity, which you can view online at the site associated with this book (thestack.org or bratton.info/ thestack). You ’ ll note two things right away. First, although the biggest presumed growth of User population is in South America, Asia, and Africa, it is North America and Europe that control many more addresses than those continents. Second, one whole quadrant (totaling hundreds of millions of addresses) is claimed by private and government actors, such as Apple, Microsoft, Halliburton, the US Department of Defense, the UK Ministry of Defense, Merck, and Lilly. One new economy of scarcity is addressability, and existing solutions to expand the address space are unlikely to be implemented as quickly as they could be. There is hard power in soft addresses as the power of the map is the power to qualify movement, and the top left corner of the IPv4 map is beachfront real estate. <sup>31</sup> But ultimately this scarcity is artificial and technologically unnecessary, and it has even distorted the structure of the Internet itself. <sup>32</sup> An original vision for the Internet platform was for decentralized “ state-full edges ” in which every node could peer with any other. “ Distributed state meant that adding nodes also added capability and that ownership and power stayed distributed as the Net grew. ... Unfortunately that chronic shortage of addresses contracted the web, shifting the definition of ‘ edge ’ from the device you are looking at to the ISP (Internet Service Provider) it ’ s connected to. ” <sup>33</sup> By contrast in an alternative postscarcity economy of addressing, with every little node also a server (hosting, sending, receiving, processing, sensing), then the physics of centralization and platforms may evolve quite differently, with communication flowing mote-to-mote, mountain-to-mountain, and mote-to-mountain, for example. Toward that, what is needed is not just another way to number the network but something that functions like a new network emerging through an enumerative infrastructure that is more correspondent to the polyvalent and multitemporal scales of The Stack.
One technical solution to the artificial scarcity of addressability is IPv6, a 128-bit address replacement for IPv4, proposed originally in the mid-1990s. When would IPv6 run out? If you were to divide the total number of possible addresses within a 128-bit space by 7 billion people, it would be able to theoretically allocate approximately 5 x 10 <sup>28</sup> addresses per person. That is an genuinely incomprehensible number; it is orders of magnitude more than Avogadro ’ s number ( >1 mole of addresses). You could, if so inclined, assign over 4 billion unique IPv6 addresses to every known star in the universe. Everyone, with his or her personal allocation, could assign a unique address to each grain of sand on Earth ’ s beaches; we could give each cell in every human body 2 x
208
Address Layer