After ICANN enabled IPv6 addressing on six of its root DNS servers, it is now possible for an IPv6-only system to connect to another similar system without the need to do DNS lookups over the older, IPv4 version of the protocol. This is the first Internet-wide implementation of the new protocol, which is expected to gradually become the new standard over the coming years.

For years, IPv6 proponents have advocated this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol because of its three main benefits: a much larger address space, security, and easier network administration through automatic device configuration. Modern operating systems, server software and networking equipment, as a rule, already support the new version of the protocol.

The most commonly cited concern over IPv4 is the limited address space, meaning that there exist "only" 4,294,967,296 (2³²) possible unique addresses, although in practice subnetting allow for a much larger address space. For comparison, IPv6 allows 2¹²⁸ unique addresses, or approximately 5×10²⁸ IPs for each of the nearly seven billion persons on the planet.

The thirteen existing root DNS servers  "translate"  URLs to IPs for all the computers on the Internet, and are controlled by ICANN, the authority governing top-level domain names. Each of the root DNS servers is not a sungle physical machine, but rather a global network of servers, where the user is normally connected to the one that is physically closest.

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