Will 2012 be a pivotal year for the Internet much like the late 1990’s was? Carolyn Duffy Marsan takes a look at the five major changes facing the Internet in 2012 for Network World.

This year, Internet Protocol will upgrade to version 6 – marking the Internet’s biggest technical upgrade ever. Also, key Internet contracts held by the US federal government are open for bid. Below are five Internet operations that will or may see significant change:

1. Root servers may have a new operator. ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has overseen the operation of the Internet root servers since 1998. ICANN’s contract expires in March 2012
2. A new operator for the .com registry. Verisign has operated the .com domain since 1999. Verisign’s contract is also set to expire.
3. New top-level domains. In January, ICANN plans to introduce up to 1,000 new top-level domains.
4. More websites will support IPv6. The U.S. federal government has a mandate to support IPv6 on all of their public-facing websites by September 2012 which could drive further IPv6 deployment in the US.
5. Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses in 2012. This again puts more pressure on carriers and enterprises to move to IPv6.