UrBC, Moscow, September 16, 2019. The shortage of IP addresses Russia might face as soon as late September could inconvenience end users wishing to browse the web, Izvestia reports.

According to the experts the newspaper applied to for information, the websites that used to offer user access, no questions asked, will now need their visitors to confirm they are not robots. A captcha will be there as well.

The issue has to do with how the Internet works: if there are not enough IP addresses available, the ISPs’ equipment will have to assign one and the same available address to a series of devices at once.

The website then remembers every time someone uses a particular IP address to access the source and treats multiple webpage hits as a hacking attack. Access to the site gets denied until the user manages to prove they are not a robot.

According to analysts, millions of Russians might have trouble getting access to web portals. Switching from the obsolete Pv4 protocol to the new IPv6 one would prove a solution to the problem.

All the major Internet businesses and ISPs are already working on this. According to RIPE NCC, 1.88m IPv4 addresses were available in Russia, Europe and the Middle East as of last week; as of September 9, only 1.69m addresses were still there.

Now Alexei Semenyaka of RIPE Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC) warned about the upcoming IPv4 address shortage for Russia, Europe and the Middle East last week.