Internet is far from infinite

The Internet often seems like a limitless landscape, connecting billions of hyperactive endpoints, with more added by the minute. But ask some of the engineers quietly working to keep those billions of nodes seamlessly connected and they'll tell you the Internet is far from infinite. In fact, it may be starting to get a bit crowded.

The problem is simple math: the Internet Protocol addresses that are assigned to differentiate networks and individual computers at the edges of the Internet have 32 digits, allowing for only a finite number of addresses--about 4.2 billion. That may seem like plenty of space for the world's online population. But huge swaths of IP addresses were originally allocated to the groups that helped build the Internet, starting with the Department of Defense and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and can't be reassigned.