The Internet Society, an organization dedicated to the good of the Internet, is organizing “World IPv6 Day” on June 8 of this year. Web giants Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, with a combined one billion visitors per day, are participating by enabling IPv6 for their main services that day. Content distributors Limelight and Akamai are also joining the party by enabling their customers to participate. But unlike during the IETF IPv6 experiment, IPv4 won’t be turned off.
Yahoo, Google, and Facebook have each been working on IPv6 for some time, but have been hesitant to simply flip the IPv6 switch and add an IPv6 address to their DNS records so everyone can reach them over IPv6. They fear becoming unreachable to users with broken IPv6 connectivity. Google did measurements in this area in 2008, which showed that at that time, 0.09 percent of their users would have to suffer delays as their computers try to connect over IPv6, and eventually fail and retry over IPv4.
