Message

There are a limited number or organisations that for legitimate reasons require globally unique address space apart from rfc1918 private address space, but may not connect to or announce these prefixes on the Internet. Rfc 2050 referenced such situations as seen in the extract below.

On a case by case basis, it may be appropriate for these few organisations to become LIRs. Perhaps the IPv4 Address Allocation policy should reference such circumstances as rfc 2050 did?

Peter Emptage

Senior Consulting Engineer

Cisco Systems

rfc 2050 extract section 3a

Assignment Framework

   An assignment is the delegation of authority over a block of IP
   addresses to an end enterprise.   The end enterprise will use
   addresses from an assignment internally only; it will not sub-
   delegate those addresses. This section discusses some of the issues
   involved in assignments and the framework behind the assignment of
   addresses.

   In order for the Internet to scale using existing technologies, use
   of regional registry services should be limited to the assignment of
   IP addresses for organizations meeting one or more of the following
   conditions:

      a) the organization has no intention of connecting to
          the Internet-either now or in the future-but it still
          requires a globally unique IP address. The organization
          should consider using reserved addresses from RFC1918.
          If it is determined this is not possible, they can be
          issued unique (if not Internet routable) IP addresses.