U.S. Government Now on IPv6

Lots of entities, despite the inevitability, have incentives to drag their feet on a transition to Internet Protocol version six (IPv6) as long as possible, the simple reason being the need to replace virtually 100 percent of their existing router infrastructure. At the beginning of June 2008, all U.S. government networks were required to migrate to IPv6, however. 

Many observers have expected U.S. government conversion to prime the pump for U.S. adoption of the new standard, which provides virtually unlimited address space, compared to the IPv4 standard now in widespread use. 

Created by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1998, IPv6 replaces IPv4, which supports 4.3 billion individually addressed devices on the network. Under a White House policy directive issued in August 2005, all federal agencies had to demonstrate the

ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by the June 30 deadline.

It wouldn't be the first time the U.S. government has primed the pump for the Internet. Without the U.S. government, there might not have been an Internet, it can be argued.