Although IPv6 has existed for a long time, it has yet to take off in many portions of the world. In the U.S., the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is pushing for it though, and recently brought online a half dozen new root DNS servers to answer for IPv6 requests. The biggest boon that this will grant to IPv6 adoption is the ability for an IPv6 host to connect to another IPv6 host without needing to resolve an address on an older IPv4 server. The functionality is not transparent, since it relies on a host being accessible via IPv6.

As the article mentions, four of the five Regional Internet Registries were accessible via IPv6, but the largest one in the U.S., American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) was not – due to ARIN not yet operating public IPv6 nameservers. But someone has to get the ball rolling, and this is probably encouraging to smaller organizations who are looking to adopt the newer protocol.