"One of these three paths will be chosen for economic reasons, and that will be the one that keeps people in business," he said.

The other big problem addressed at FutureNet was the potential strain that new IP addresses could put on routing tables, which are the master lists of network destinations stored in backbone routers that decide on the optimal paths between networks. During a panel session titled "The End of the Internet?" several industry experts said that the strain on routing tables was both a short- and long-term concern because routing tables are not scalable and don't adapt to exponential increases in IP addresses. As APNIC member Geoff Huston told Network World years ago, "It's not the size of the table, but the number of updates per second that kills a router stone dead."

"Imagine that you have an airline and you get to choose from 100 cities that you can go to, but then quickly you find out that 100 aren't enough and that you can't list all places that you need to go," said FutureNet panelist Mike O'Dell, a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates.

John Curran, chairman of the American Registry of Internet Numbers, says the shift to IPv6 will help the routing table problem as the IPv6 routing tables will have a fresh slate to process and catalogue more IP addresses. However, Curran also notes that there will be problems during the transition because IPv4 routing tables will still be unable to process the flood of new IP addresses.

"When everyone gets around to IPv6 we'll have more capacity, but ... it's still only a clean slate to have the same problem on," Curran said. "We don't have anyone moving on to the next point."

Panelist Scott Bradner, who also writes the weekly Net Insider column for Network World, echoed Curran's concerns and said that switching to IPv6 was not a comprehensive long-term solution for the routing table problem.

"The Internet never stabilizes, and the changes occur faster than the routing table can be computed," Bradner said. "IPv6 doesn't change computing time or change the problem in any fundamental way."

But when asked what long-term solutions for routing table woes might be out there, the panelists mostly balked: They said there weren't any quick fixes that would alleviate the problem and that we'd have to be content with IPv6 alleviating the problem for the time being, with the larger overall problems being considered further down the road.

"The basic, fundamental problems of scaling a network haven't been addressed in any innovative manner," said Curran. "This current, rough, working model that's been held together with Band-Aids is going to go through an interesting event in a five-to-10-year time frame."

But even with these bumpy changes due to occur in how the Web works, Bradner and other panelists agreed that talk of the Web's imminent demise is greatly exaggerated.

"For all the talk about doom and gloom, the experiment that we've been running has been working pretty well so far," Bradner said.