1. Abstract

IP unicast address allocation and management are essential operational functions for the Public Internet. The exact policies for IP unicast address allocation and management continue to be the subject of many discussions. Such discussions cannot be pursued in a vacuum - the participants must understand the technical issues and implications associated with various address allocation and management policies.

The purpose of this document is to articulate certain relevant fundamental technical issues that must be considered in formulating unicast address allocation and management policies for the Public Internet, and to provide recommendations with respect to these policies.

The major focus of this document is on two possible policies, "address ownership" and "address lending," and the technical implications of these policies for the Public Internet. For the organizations that could provide reachability to a sufficiently large fraction of the total destinations in the Internet, and could express such reachability through a single IP address prefix the document suggests to use the "address ownership" policy. However, applying the "address ownership" policy to every individual site or organization that connects to the Internet results in a non-scalable routing.

Consequently, this document also recomments that the "address lending" policy should be formally added to the set of address allocation policies in the Public Internet. The document also recommends that organizations that do not provide a sufficient degree of routing information aggregation, but wish to obtain access to the Internet routing services should be strongly encouraged to use this policy to gain access to the services.