The Internet finally has run out of addresses — sort of.

The organization that oversees Internet protocol addresses — numbers that help direct online traffic — doled out the last remaining batches of numbers under the current addressing system on Thursday. Internet experts hailed the event as a milestone in the evolution of the Web, one that will eventually require changes on the part of some companies and users. But it didn’t come as a surprise.

More than a decade ago, the Internet’s founding fathers realized that the roughly 4.3 billion addresses under the current system, known as IPv4, eventually would be exhausted. They created a new scheme with a practically unlimited number of addresses, IPv6, which is expected to succeed the original naming scheme.

The announcement doesn’t mean there are no more IPv4 addresses to be handed out. The batches were distributed to five regional organizations around the globe, who will allocate the numbers to “service providers” — a group that includes Internet operators and Web firms — over the coming months.