I want to share you something that happened the other day and will be happening more and more, people will lie to you. Like most of us we hang on to every word of any person we respect, even to the point of taking notes.

Well, they can lie.

The other day talking about the internet, trying to come up with a clever domain name for my latest website, to a very dear and trusted friend in Costa Rica’s premier mall, Multiplaza Escazú, while sipping espressos, he told me something I couldn’t believe what he told me, “better get your domain name quickly, I hear they’re running low”!

OMG,! what am I going to do? I can’t live without the internet?

I know what you are thinking. How can that be? Every domain name could be taken? Maybe in Costa Rica. But the whole wide world?

I almost believed him for a minute, after all there are a whole lot of websites out there. Everybody and his brother (or sister) has a website. Maybe it could be true?

Yes, I know I have a blond hair these days, but did I catch a bad case of gullibilitis? And is there a cure?

Maybe it was the coffee. Yes, that’s it, a taste of that fine, rich Costa Rican coffee just went to our heads.

Now, seriously, could the internet really run out space?

When a small group of university scientists began linking computers on different campus sites at the very end of the 1960s, they had no idea that their work would one day spiral into a globally-accessible network in which the total number of pages is measured in the tens of billions.

Such has been the Internet’s phenomenal and dizzying growth that much of the technology which supports it has grown organically and without much forward planning, much like the lack of forward planning in Costa Rica’s infrastructure.

But what if the Internet was to run out of space?

This isn’t just a theoretical debate, but something experts warn could become a real issue within a few years. Now, one business school professor studying the issue believes he may have come up with a solution.

The problem isn’t one of storage, but of location, the so-called IP addresses which are handed out to new sites. These are all given a unique number based on something called the IPv4 (Internet protocol version 4) standard, the system under which the web first expanded globally.

IPv4 assigns main host addresses using a system which gives around 4 billion possible combinations, a figure which at the time seemed greater than could possibly ever be used. But now the numbers are running out. A new system, IPv6, has been developed, but technical issues and a reluctance among Web companies to begin using it means it could be years before this is widely adopted.

Benjamin G. Edelman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is warning that such a bottleneck could seriously hamper the Internet, saying the Web is in danger of becoming “a victim of its own success.”

But, here’s the catch. Because there are so many addresses under IPv6, it will be a lot easier to identify people online by looking at their IP address.

Right now, your address is often obscured because your computer is on a network of some kind that supplies its own IP instead of your unique one – but after IPv6, your computer’s address will be visible to the entire world wide.