In the subtle-but-important department, this week the internet observed a small milestone.

To understand it, one must know a little bit about domains. Domains are those names you type in the address bar at the top of your browser window, after the http and ending with something like .com or .net. In their simplest form, a domain is an address that you type, hit enter, and your browser takes you to it and shows you their homepage.

But underneath that, a domain stands for the physical address of a web server somewhere — a less attractive, and certainly less memorable address that probably looks something like 75.126.67.221. Its called an IP address, and everything connected to the internet has one, and its part of the mechanism by which computers communicate with one another. 75.126.67.221 happens to be the current IP of this very website, and how likely are you to remember that?

So domains are aliases, serving an important function by making getting around the web easy on the eyes and on the memory. The problem, however, is that you can only make so many combinations of ten numbers and dots. And while four billion seems like a lot, we have been inching closer and closer to exhausting the worlds supply of addresses every year.

This is where our milestone comes in. This past week the world's domain registries began accepting a new style of IP address   one that allows for so many more possible combinations its hard to even understand the numbers. The new standard (called IPv6) allows for something like 2¹²⁸ possible addresses. To give you an idea of how unfathomably huge that is, thats 2²⁶ IP addresses for every known star in the universe! It ought to hold us for a while.