Ya know, that's the kind of metaphysical realm that programmers enter into every day. I create "things" that I couldn't possibly describe, that have no mass or dimension or any physical reality at all, yet they have structure that I can see in my mind's eye, and most importantly, they impinge on the "real" world and have a real effect "out here".

Are we really having a conversation? Are you real? Or am I imagining you? How can I really be sure?

The IP is a protocol layer that runs on top of TCP, "Transport Control Protocol", to make a protocol "stack" called "TCP/IP". The Pentagon developed it originally, but it's out in the public domain now, and nobody owns it, so there's no risk of an intellectual-property monopoly shutting it down. There's no real risk of a physical monopolist, e.g. a telco or government, shutting it down either, because it's so distributed. It doesn't really require the huge sophisticated infrastructure we have now. If the big companies and utilities went away, people could reconstruct the Net in literally a few days, albeit with lower bandwidth, just by going back to modems and rolling our own.

Remember that the Internet was designed originally to survive a nuclear attack, through a highly distributed design and a mechanism for finding new paths to route data in real time. That also, ironically enough, makes it highly resistant to censorship. John Perry Barlow once said that "The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it." Places like China are fighting a losing battle in the long run, and I can tell you that there are a lot of awfully smart people, among them the people who designed the Net in the first place, working to route around censorship. One fundamental way to do it is to use protocols that the censors aren't watching. The Web uses HTTP (on top of TCP/IP) and that's where the filters are installed; but there's no reason you can't send the same HTML pages using other protocols or by hiding it inside another transmission, like VOIP (Voice Over IP, i.e. Internet phones). Have faith: We'll always be one jump ahead of the censors.

The new protocol you've heard about is called "TCP/IP v6", and it was developed mainly by academics with some help from the industry. It's pretty much ready to go, but the big problem is figuring out how to install the upgrade on a billion PCs and several million Net infrastructure boxes. I think Microsoft already includes it in Windows, and mainly we're waiting for the infrastructure to catch up.

v6 has lots of bug fixes and improvements, but the most important angle is that it has a much larger address space, and it uses it more efficiently than the current version. You know the present IP format "nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn"? Slicing the bits up into four sections like that made sense at the time as a way of hierarchically assigning address blocks--your ISP might get 235.nnn.nnn.nnn and assign the 'n's to its customers--but it leaves huge awkward gaps that waste addresses. Even if it were used more efficiently, it still doesn't have enough bits--32 bits is only a few billion addresses, and when you add all the automated devices being connected to the Net on top of all the PCs, we'll run out of addresses soon. v6 is several orders of magnitude bigger, so we should have at least a few decades before we have to sweat it again.

There ya go. Glad you asked? ;-)