Imagine if you had to assign a different address of a limited length to every home in a large and rapidly growing neighbourhood. You would soon run out of number combinations.
The World-Wide Web equivalent - governing the distribution and usage of Internet protocol (IP) addresses in Asia-Pacific - is a tough job, as Paul Wilson, the director-general of Apnic, has discovered.
Apnic, the Asian-Pacific Network Information Centre, doles out IP addresses to individuals and companies on the basis of need and demand.
Mr Wilson recently was on a whirlwind tour of the region to meet the members and Internet service providers they serve.
Hong Kong has the second-greatest number of IP addresses in Apnic, after Japan.
In 1996, Apnic established Apricot (Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies), a convention that focuses on Internet technologies in the region.
It is easy to confuse Apnic and regional Internet registries with domain-name providers such as Network Solutions because the terms IP address and domain name have become synonymous. However, the technologies are different. A domain name is what comes before the .com in a URL (uniform resource locator) such as microsoft.com or yahoo.com.
