摘要：In their “The End of Eternity” articles, (IPJ Volume 11, No. 4 and
Volume 12, No. 1) Niall Murphy and David Wilson provide a de-
tailed and compelling description of the lasting harm that could result
from the exhaustion of unallocated IPv4 addresses—harm to Internet
users and aspiring new entrants, to technical-coordination and fault-
management mechanisms, and to the likely irreplaceable cooperative
decision-making and consensus-development mechanisms that distin-
guish the Internet from every other important transnational sphere of
activity in human history. Thankfully, the authors foresee a potential
happy ending—or at least yet another chapter in the story—in “an
IPv6 Internet, or at least enough of one to keep off address scarcity for
a workable subset of the industry.”
