• Internet protocols govern the transmission of data packets across the web.Richard Newstead/Lifesize/Getty Images
  
  IP4, also called IPv4, is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP) to be deployed in the world wide web. While IP4 was the first protocol to be widely deployed across the Internet, as of 2010 it shares the Internet with the sixth version of the Internet Protocol (IP6 or IPv6). While IP4 was still the overwhelmingly dominant IP in 2010, IP6 is positioned to replace its predecessor due to the Internet's rapid expansion in the years since the turn of the millennium.
  
  

Packet Delivery

• IP4 uses the Best Effort Delivery method. This means that the protocol is not designed to guarantee that every single data packet that is sent across the Internet is received by the intended recipient. Rather, the protocol seeks to guarantee that the entirety of the information, which is encapsulated across many data packets, is received by the intended recipient. Consequently, a redundant number of data packets are sent for each piece of information being transmitted; this delivery method ensures that at least one data package containing each piece of information is received to form the complete whole.
  
  

32-bit Addresses

• IP4 defines at 32-bit address. This means that there are a total of 4,294,967,296 possible addresses available to be assigned to users. This was a large number when the Internet was born, but between the rapid expansion of internet access in developing countries, and the proliferation of portable devices that access the internet (smart-phones, iPods, voice over IP devices) the number was rapidly dwindling as of 2010. The phasing in of IP6 was meant to address this issue before the Internet was unable to accommodate new users. While in retrospect, one reason the global expansion of the World Wide Web has strained the IP4's capabilities is the limited number of IP addresses that it is capable of, experts also cite inefficient use of the existing addresses -- while over half of all available addresses are assigned to Internet service providers, corporations and governments, only 69 million were actually in use as of 2001.
  
  

Webpages and IP4 Addresses

• While IP addresses are numerical, users navigate to web pages through alphabetical website titles. This is executed through the Domain Name System (DNS), which resolves which domain names (website addresses) are assigned to which IP addresses.