Yahoo!’s participation in World IPv6 Day will provide real-world data for Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors, and Web companies.  Key learnings from this event will help the industry work together to ensure a smooth transition to IPv6.

Why Is IPv6 Important for the Internet?
Thirty years ago, the Internet was born.  It was commercialized in 1995, and has been steadily growing since. Though it started out as an experiment, it has grown into a critical part of our everyday lives — many people now rely more on the Internet than the telephone or the television.

We are now outgrowing the current IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) design.  We are running out of distinct numerical IP addresses (similar to telephone numbers) to give users and services.  For the long-term health of the Internet, it is time for it to evolve – to “IPv6”. The primary benefit from this new protocol is a much larger address.  We are moving from 32-bit addresses to 128-bit addresses.  With the telephone analogy, this would be like moving from a 10-digit phone number to a 38 digit phone number.

What Will Happen to IPv4?
The current IPv4 protocol will be with us for years to come.  Many websites and ISP may be slow to upgrade to IPv6.  Some customers may find no value in upgrading their home equipment.

ISPs will be forced to continue delivering IPv4 service despite running out of unique IPv4 addresses.  The realistic solution for ISPs will be to have several houses share a single public address (using NAT, or Network Address Translation).  This will be similar to a telephone party line, where several houses shared a single phone line and phone number.  Basic web browsing and basic mail will still work, but several peer-to-peer applications will break.  Examples of this can include voice and video chat, online video gaming, and file sharing.

The future of IPv4 with address sharing has potential to be more vulnerable for security issues, too.  Today, a common method for websites to deal with hackers and abuse is to block the IP address. What happens if they have to block a shared IP address?  If you have to share an IP address with a thousand neighbors and just one of them has a compromised computer doing Bad Stuff, you might find yourself locked out of your email or banking website.

Wide-scale adoption of IPv6 will bypass these nuisances.  IPv6 will ensure that the Internet experience you have today will be preserved (or improved upon!) in the future.

How Will Yahoo! Participate?
Yahoo!’s goal is to motivate organizations across the industry — Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors, and Web companies — to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 address space runs out.   Yahoo! is a leader in addressing the scaling challenges facing the Internet and is committed to lead industry players to support the new protocol.

Most of our “front page” websites (such as Yahoo.com) will be participating in this test.  This includes our international sites.

Only our HTML servers will be dual-stack.  This means that serving our pages will still require IPv4 service for images, scripts, and style sheets.  World IPv6 Day is about enabling IPv6, not about going IPv6-only.   It will be another 2-4 years before one can expect industry-wide support of IPv6-only users.

Destination sites such as mail.yahoo.com, finance.yahoo.com, and others will not be participating in this event; you will still be able to directly visit those sites regardless of what else happens on World IPv6 Day.   API services through the Yahoo! Developer Network will also be unaffected.

How Will This Day Impact You?
Chances are, it won’t.

World IPv6 Day is meant to provide a limited controlled window where any problems can be exposed and corrected.  We expect few problems, since we are at the early stages of IPv6 adoption.  With such a large scale test, however, at least a few problems are expected.

If you are already an IPv6 user, you may see increased latency, due to increased IPv6 traffic.  Circuits and routers may be busier than service providers expected.   You may see connectivity problems not seen previously, due to few web sites today having IPv6 addresses.  In these cases, contact your IPv6 service provider.

One risk category that has been identified involves hosts that have IPv6 enabled, but incorrectly configured.  Industry estimates are that 0.05% of the internet population falls into this category; or 1:2000.

When hosts have IPv6 configured, browsers will prefer IPv6 over IPv4.   This means that when a web site offers both IPv4 and IPv6, the browser will pick IPv6.  When the host is incorrectly configured with a non-functional IPv6 address, this means the browser will spend several seconds (or even minutes) before giving up and trying IPv4.

You can test for this ahead of time by visiting http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ipv6/ , and trying our online test.

If you do have problems on World IPv6 Day..
First, make sure your internet connection is working.  You can visit http://ipv4.yahoo.com to see if you can reach Yahoo! using IPv4.  If that does not work, then ask your ISP for assistance with basic IPv4 internet service.

If http://www.yahoo.com fails, but http://ipv4.yahoo.com works, you are possibly in the “broken configuration” category.  You can try these steps first; they may fix or at least reduce the slow connection behavior.  Some vendors are working diligently to gracefully handle incorrect IPv6 configurations.

• Make sure your home router or wifi router is up to date.
• Make sure your OS is up to date
• Make sure your browser is up to date
• Disable “6to4” (automatic tunnels); they allow a transient temporary form of IPv6 .  They usually don’t have a way for you to complain about their service.  You may find this on your host, or on your router.

Disable “Teredo” if you (or software you use) enabled it.  The default Teredo configuration is safe (and only activates under limited conditions).  Some software changes the Teredo settings to encourage always using Teredo for IPv6 addresses.

If these do not help, and you are unable to correct the IPv6 configuration, then you’ll need to disable IPv6.  You will find instructions at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ipv6/general .  If you do disable IPv6, you’ll need to re-enable it once your service provider offers IPv6 services.

How do I get IPv6?
Check with your internet service provider.  Many are working behind the scenes to get ready for IPv6.   Some have already started commercial deployments.  We anticipate several IPv6 related services being made available in the next 3-12 months from a broad spectrum of service providers.

If you’re comfortable with the idea of setting up IP tunnels, consider looking for “ipv6 tunnel providers” .  Tunnels are a convenient way to get early access to IPv6, and do early testing of your products.  Keep in mind that tunnels may bypass your firewalls; be sure to do a security review and protect yourself adequately.

Adam Bechtel—Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering

This week Yahoo! will be opening our network to third-party ID sign-in options with Facebook and Google.  We’re offering people who don’t already have a Yahoo! account (and even those who do) a new way to participate, create, and share their experiences across almost all of Yahoo!. Basically, we’re delivering a great personal experience on Yahoo!, whether you sign in with a Yahoo!, Facebook, or Google ID.

After you sign-in to Yahoo! with your Google or Facebook ID (check out the screen cast to see how easy it is) you’ll be able to start sharing articles, leaving comments, playing Fantasy Sports, personalizing your stock portfolio, rating movies, music and restaurants, and much more.

If you’ve been following Yahoo! you know that we’ve been moving in this direction for a while, innovating with new technologies and open standards (like OpenID) to create a more friendly and personal Web experience. In 2008, we became one of the world’s largest providers of OpenIDs and in October of last year we introduced OpenID log-in with Google on Flickr to make it easier for you to connect with fellow photo enthusiasts and share your photos with the world. We also deepened our commitment to integrating Yahoo! with other social networks when we integrated with Facebook in 2009. It’s our ongoing goal to find new ways to make logging into and engaging with all of the amazing experiences we offer at Yahoo! as effortless as possible.

As a place that over 600 million people visit every month, Yahoo! strives every day to bring you the content, information, tools and meaningful social connections relevant to you from across the Web. It’s our belief that by continuing to open up the Yahoo! network to third-party IDs, we can help more folks join in the fun and create exciting, more personalized and inclusive online experiences.  So sign-in and enjoy the new fast pass to your personal Web on Yahoo!.

The Yodel Editors

We’ll start the day by learning about the important role that governments play in protecting privacy and free expression. Panelists including Sarah Labowitz of the U.S. State Department and Christine Bader, Advisor to the UN Special Representative for Business & Human Rights, and Kum Hong Siew, former member of parliament, Singapore will discuss various government approaches to addressing free expression and privacy rights in the Internet, Technology and Communications (ICT) sector.

Another panel, featuring Evgeny Morozov, Yahoo!’s 2010 Georgetown Fellow and contributing editor to Foreign Policy; Andrew Lewman of the Tor Project; Kathleen Reen of Internews and Alan Huang of UltraReach Internet, will discuss the innovative solutions they have created and discovered, all targeted at evading government restrictions on free expression and privacy.

We will also have a fascinating discussion about unconventional threats to online privacy and free expression, during which we will learn about how issues like account deactivation and terms of service violations can have unintended chilling effects on privacy and free expression. Panelists for that discussion include Dr. Mehdi Yahyanejad, founder and editor of Balatarin.com (a site for news and opinions about Iran), Scott Rubin of Google, Kim Pham of AccessNow (an advocacy group that uses technology to keep activists in press and Internet restrictive countries connected), and Danny O’Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Our final panel will feature journalists, bloggers, social entrepreneurs and film-makers, who will share stories about how they are using the Internet and technology to drive social change.  We’ll hear from Abbas Gassem, the founder and editor of Inside Somalia (an online news and opinion platform focused on Somalian political and social issues;) from Sameer Padania, the former manager of the human rights video sharing platform at Witness.org; from Nadia Trinidad, Yahoo!’s Stanford Fellow and senior correspondent from the ABS-CBN Broadcasting Company in Manila, Philippines; from Elia Serra, the co-founder and director of Maneno (a blogging platform created for and by bloggers and journalists in sub-Saharan Africa) and Omid Memarian, noted UC Berkeley Rotary Peace Fellow and Iranian journalist and blogger.

For more information about the Summit, please see here.

For those of you  who will not be joining us in Sunnyvale, we will be posting video shortly after the event, so please stay tuned!

Ebele Okobi-Harris, Director of Yahoo’s Business & Human Rights Program

Here’s the bottom line:

• Yahoo! will use this agreement to help us become a stronger competitor in all aspects of online advertising; and
• Yahoo! is not exiting the sponsored search business. We plan to remain a strong player in sponsored search.

What is the agreement?

You may have heard that the agreement gives Google control over 90% of search advertising. That’s just plain wrong. It’s simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit. The reason we structured the deal this way – rather than a more typical exclusive deal with revenue commitments to us and traffic commitments to Google – was precisely to avoid the issues the critics are raising.

Since Yahoo! bought Overture five years ago, we’ve run that business as a closed system. For example, if you want to put a sponsored search ad on a Yahoo! search results page (“SRP”), you have to buy the ad from us. Right now, that’s the only way to access the millions of online customers who visit the Yahoo! network at the key moment when they express their interests by making a search query. Given the size of our user base and the extraordinary diversity of searches they generate, we cannot, by ourselves, provide relevant paid search ads for every search – we can’t “fill up” all of our SRPs.

In fact, no one company can fill them up – not even Google. Yes, you read that right. There are millions of unique queries, like “elevation of Mount Elbert” and many of them are never matched to a relevant sponsored search ad. These “uncovered” queries are missed opportunities for advertisers to directly engage with consumers and for consumers to benefit from relevant offers. Fortunately, Yahoo! has strong “coverage” and “depth” for many queries – meaning we have a good number of ads to display for many searches. However, coverage and depth are not equal for all categories in our marketplaces. One of our key goals is to unlock the huge value of the hundreds of thousands of less popular queries that don’t show ads Yahoo! today.

The “monetization gap” between Google and Yahoo! is in reality a value gap. Where Google is getting higher bids than Yahoo! today, this is because advertisers perceive that Google is delivering more value – more targeted leads, more clicks, and more conversions. That’s why an advertiser might be willing to bid more for a click on Google than for a click on Yahoo! – the belief that the advertiser will get more value from Google. Google is not setting prices. Advertisers determine how to value keywords. Yahoo! is committed to providing advertisers with greater value and consumers with more relevant offers and this agreement helps us meet this challenge more quickly.

Increasing advertiser value is a complicated endeavor. Part of it is technological –- for example, building better matching algorithms. Part of it is giving advertisers more control over their advertising campaigns. But we also want to increase revenue by building query share, which takes time.

In the past year, we have thought about these challenges very carefully and we created a strategy that we’re convinced is a “win win” for Yahoo! and advertisers. The core idea is limited use of Google ads to deliver more value from our SRPs and other inventory in circumstances where we aren’t delivering the best advertiser value today, and then to use resources gained by that strategy to accelerate our investments in the technologies and marketplaces of the future. That’s where the agreement comes in — it allows us to provide better, more valuable connections immediately.

Current thoughts on implementation

We will implement the agreement in a way that respects an important principle you may know as the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm.” That is, we will not use Google ads in a manner that would create a significant risk to the health of our own sponsored search business.

It’s important for us to recognize when using Google ads is beneficial for users and advertisers. Queries for which we have no coverage, low depth, and/or low relative monetization are all circumstances in which backfilling probably makes sense -– they indicate that Yahoo! is not currently delivering enough value for that inventory. If Google can deliver that value where we currently don’t, then everyone wins -– including the advertiser and the consumer.

It’s equally important for us to protect the long-term health of our marketplaces. As we studied this issue, we became acutely aware that our value proposition depends on having an active, “liquid” marketplace of search terms. The good news? Yahoo! has that for the more popular and commercial queries –- the ones that produce over two-thirds of Yahoo!’s search revenues. This is often not the case, however, for less popular “tail” queries.

As we proceed, we’ll hold true to our goal of making Yahoo! a “must buy” for online advertisers. We have no intention of abandoning our key advertiser relationships. To the contrary, we are exploring ways to further strengthen those relationships, and one of the ways we will do that is through our recently announced Digital Advisory Council. We are asking industry executives from our agency and advertiser partners to join us as we explore the continued evolution of digital media and online advertising. We’re going to start by addressing the confusion and misinformation that currently exists in the market regarding Yahoo!’s agreement with Google, which is a hotly debated topic that needs some much-needed clarification.

I’ve said in the past that we’ll backfill where the monetization gap between Yahoo! and Google is the greatest. This gap is the greatest in areas in which we don’t have matches of offers with very specific queries or where our matches are narrow or not relevant. This should only enhance our relevance to consumers and bring new advertisers to our inventory that didn’t do business with us or that made only limited commitments. Our overriding principle to backfill will be those win-win opportunities to backfill our inventory with advertising that clients find valuable but to which they have had scarce access and in other ways that both optimize for user experience and the maintenance of a robust marketplace.

Finally, let me be absolutely clear that we are not in any way going to be coordinating or setting search term pricing with Google. The fact is that advertisers set prices by bidding in our real time auctions. This agreement gives advertisers a new opportunity to bid for placement on an additional network that includes Yahoo! inventory. They will bid for what they think this opportunity is worth at prices that produce positive ROI. That’s how pricing works today in this industry and this agreement won’t change that.

I hope readers of this post, as well as advertisers and regulators, can move past the false rhetoric being peddled by some of our competitors and see the marvelous potential that the agreement offers the marketplace. It’s a great opportunity for Yahoo!, and we’re committed to implementing it in a way that produces the most value for advertisers and users. Ultimately, that’s the only way we can provide value for Yahoo!’s stockholders.

Sue Decker
President

Our strategy to fully realize Yahoo!’s potential is based on the convergence of search and display — the next big opportunity in the rapidly growing online ad industry. This agreement helps us capitalize on that. We’re moving full speed ahead to execute with speed, commitment, and passion.

It’s also in keeping with our open strategy — WebMD sells their audiences on Yahoo!, Yelp can customize how their local search results appear using Search Monkey, advertisers and publishers will buy and sell in an open marketplace with our upcoming AMP! from Yahoo!, and we’re now opening our paid search results to Google.

I wanted to put this arrangement in perspective and comment on what it is and what it isn’t. First, it does not signal that Yahoo! plans to exit paid search. Quite the contrary. Through the financial benefits of better monetizing our search traffic, we’ll be investing in search services and ad platforms, including Panama. An independent search business is critical to our future. We will retain complete flexibility and will call the shots on where and how often Google ads will appear. While Google has better advertiser coverage in some query areas, we still have the ability to provide Panama ads where they are most valuable.

Second, this deal is good for competition. It may seem counterintuitive that doing a deal with a competitor would improve our competitive position. But as search and display continue their convergence, it puts Yahoo! in a better position to innovate and compete aggressively with Google and others for ad dollars. It also offers advertisers more choice and publishers gain better distribution and monetization to grow their business.

Finally, this agreement is non-exclusive. We remain completely free to display any paid search listings across our properties — whether from Yahoo!, Google, or any other third parties.

We’ve done something important today. We are directly addressing one key element in Yahoo!’s strategy to lead the way in search and display. I believe it puts us on a faster track to creating stockholder value and strengthening our advertising leadership.

It is, of course, just one step. We’ll continue to look at all of our alternatives to advance our strategies and enhance growth and profitability.

Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo and CEO