Thursday is the decisive day for exhausting Internet space

As the Internet is running out of its space a press conference will be held this week in Miami to decide on the last allocation of the Internet Protocol Version 4 addresses. The conference will be conducted by the central authority that assigns them.

According to an advisory sent Tuesday the meeting will gather four nonprofit organizations that coordinate the Internet's addressing system including the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Number Resources Organization, the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Society.

The total supply of 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses has been coming to exhaustion. IPv4 addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a part of ICANN, in large "/8" blocks of about 16 million addresses each. IANA has allocated all but five of these blocks, and its rules now call for one of the remaining blocks to be handed out to each of the five regional Internet registries (RIRs).

Once the RIRs get those final blocks, they will be able to keep assigning addresses to local enterprises and ISPs but won't be able to go back to IANA for more. Under these conditions, some RIRs are expected to tighten their own rules for handing out addresses. The Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), which earlier this week received two /8 blocks from IANA, has said each of its account holders will only be eligible for one more minimum-sized allocation. APNIC thinks those allocations can continue for about five years. It will hold one smaller block in reserve during that time.