Historic Internet change takes place

(CNN) - There's a historic and very important change taking place across the entire Internet. But you probably won't notice a thing.

Wednesday marks the launch of a new Internet protocol known as IPv6 .

That's the system that assigns numbered addresses to every computer, smartphone and other device connected to the Internet.

The old protocol, IPv4, had room for about four billion IP addresses.

But there are now so many devices online, the Internet has run out of room. The new protocol fixes that, with room for 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.