Earlier today, someone I follow on Twitter retweeted a message from Alyssa Milano. This is what the former TV star had to say:

Less Than 1 Year Until The Internet Runs Out of Addresses

This wasn't the first time someone said that we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses soon. Or, to stick to the TV theme: all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

It all started with the Internet Engineering Task Force in the early 1990s. Reportedly, it was determined that we'd run out of addresses in 2005. Two years before that apocalyptic year, on September 4, 2003, I was sitting in the Grand Ballroom of the Krasnapolsky Hotel in the center of Amsterdam for the last day of sessions of theRIPE-46 meeting. (The RIPE NCC is the organization that gives out IP addresses in Europe and some other regions.) Geoff Huston gave a presentation titled "IPv4 Address Lifetime Expectancy Revisited" where he showed the trends in IP address deployment, and used a simple model to extrapolate these trends to predict the moment the last IP address would be used up. According to the then available data and the model, that last IPv4 address would be put into actual use somewhere between 2038 and 2045—no, that's not military time for later tonight, but sometime between Y2K38 and 100 years after the end of World War II.

So we went from "two years left" to "35 years left" in less than an afternoon. (Of course by 2003 everyone had realized we