IPng History and Process Even the most farseeing of the developers of TCP/IP in the early 1980s could not imagine the dilemma of scale that the Internet faces today. With realistic projections of many millions of in- terconnected networks in the not too distant fu- ture the Internet faces the dilemma of choosing between accepting limiting the rate of growth and ultimate size of the Internet. or disrupting the network by changing to new techniques or tech- nologies.. The IETF started an effort to select a suc- cessor to IPv4 in late 1990 when projections in- dicated that the Internet address space available using the 32 bit addresses of IPv4 would become an increasingly limiting resource. Several parallel efforts then started exploring ways to resolve the address limitations while at the same time provid- ing functionality beyond that of IPv4. The IETF formed the IPng Area in late 1993 to investigate the various proposals and recommend how to pro- ceed with a successor to IPv4. This talk will review the history of the IP Next Generation effort and the IETF process which lead to the selection of an IPng. It will include a discussion of the issues in the Internet which lead to the realization of the need for an IPng, the history of this effort in the IETF. and the process of how the decision was made to select an IPng. Technical Overview of IPng A new version of the Internet's core proto- col. IP. has been developed by the Internet En- gineering Task Force (IETF) and is now entering the IETF Standards track. The new IP, known as IPng or IP version 6. is designed to meet the scaling requirements imposed by the explosive growth of the Internet. and to meet the demand for greater functionality at the internet layer. in- cluding strong security, automated configuration. and support for multimedia traffic. This talk will be a technical overview of IPng - explaining how and why it differs from the current version of IP- and a status report on the protocol specifications. implementations, and plans for deployment.