Europe will run out of capacity for new internet addresses by early next year, potentially cutting the UK off from the rest of the world online, one of the founding fathers of the communications network warned today.

Vint Cerf, vice-president of Google and the man dubbed "the godfather of the net", said the shortage of internet address space represented a "serious boundary" to the growth of the medium.

Cerf added that the problem is one of the "biggest set of changes in the history of the internet".