This draft has generated a tremendous amount of discussion within the

Internet community about the concept of address ownership and what

it means in the context of global routing. 

Administrators of smaller organizations that want to own their

addresses have concerns about the difficulty of renumbering and their

lack of self determination if their provider or their provider's upstream

provider changes its provider. 

Finally, ISPs have concerns because the term  large provider  has not

been defined. At this time, the discussion continues since any criteria

recommended by the IETF is bound to be perceived as unfair by some. 

Procedures for Internet/Enterprise Renumbering (PIER)

In the face of the address ownership versus address lending debate, it is

clear that renumbering has become an issue. Procedures for

Internet/Enterprise Renumbering (PIER) is a working group of the IETF

charged with the task of developing a renumbering strategy. 

RFC 1916 is a request by PIER for the Internet community to provide

assistance in the development of a series of documents describing how

an organization might proceed to renumber its network. The ultimate

goal of these documents is to provide education and practical experi 

ence to the Internet community. 

Market Based Allocation of IP Address Blocks

An Internet Draft,  Suggestions for Market Based Allocation of IP

Address Blocks,  is a proposal to make IPv4 address assignments trans 

ferable and condones the exchange of money as part of the transfer pro 

cedure. The draft suggests that the Internet community embrace the

profit motive as an incentive to motivate organizations to act in ways

that will improve resource use. This proposal is similar to another pro 

posal to introduce financial incentives for route aggregation (that is,

have ISPs levy a charge for each route advertised). The idea is to move

the decisions regarding scarce resources from a political atmosphere to a

financial environment that is better suited to deal with scarcity. 

U N D E R S TA N D I N G   I P   A D D R E S S I N G

4 2