IPv6 web starts to look like the internet we know

Hurricane Electric's daily report on IPv6 adoption isn't the kind of thing you'd report on too often, but Vulture South sometimes takes a look in case the internet suddenly woke up and decided to ramp up its deployment of the addressing scheme.

Germany is the largest national IPv6 top-level domain (TLD) with 13,155,766 domains, with Canada far behind at 1,420,247, and nearly 96 per cent of TLDs have IPv6 nameservers somewhere.

While looking over the raw data – that there are 114,904,696 .com domains running v6, 15,060,980 .net domains, 20 .au domains and so on, El Reg happened to scan down to the list of top-100 websites responding over the protocol.

It's a long time since El Reg thought it worthwhile to look over top-website lists, but there is something to glean from the IPv6 rankings. While IPv6 is still a trivially small number of sites compared to the internet as a whole, the popularity of content types is starting to look like the larger internet, a small hint that v6 is getting enough users to reflect the world at large.

Actually, Hurricane picks off three top-100 lists: those whose raw domains (google.com) respond to IPv6, those whose www domains do so, and those that append ID their v6 domains (ipv6.google.com). Hurricane uses Alexa rankings from the olde-worlde IPv4 web to poll for v6 support.

Across the 209 domains in the de-duped list of the top 300 IPv6 sites, Google is far and away the biggest presence, owning nearly 80 per cent of the domains.

A much better picture of diversity in IPv6 web servers emerges in those carrying an ipv6 prefix, where after the Indian shopping site Flipkart and Arabic news site Youm7 we start to see familiar names like Scribd, Bloomberg, CNN and Netflix.

Russia's Yandex search engine makes the list a few times (not only in Russia, also in Turkey, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine).

At 169,443,924 domains, the IPv6 world is still far behind the billion-website web. And, as proof positive that the IPv6 web looks like the “ordinary” internet, yes, there are pr0nsters there as well. ®