9. IANA Considerations

IANA allocates IPv4 addresses in the range 232.0.0.1 through 232.0.0.255 and IPv6 addresses in the range FF3x:4000:0001 to FF3x::7FFF:FFFF. These addresses are allocated according to IETF Consensus [IANA-CONSID]. These address ranges are reserved for services with wide applicability that either require that or would strongly benefit if all hosts use a well-known SSM destination address for that service. Any proposal for allocation must consider the fact that, on an Ethernet network, all datagrams sent to any SSM destination address will be transmitted with the same link-layer destination address, regardless of the source. Furthermore, the fact that SSM destinations in 232.0.0.0/24 and 232.128.0.0/24 use the same link-layer addresses as the reserved IP multicast group range 224.0.0.0/24 must also be considered. Similar consideration should be given to the IPv6 reserved multicast addresses. 232.0.0.0 and FF3x::4000:0000 should not be allocated, as suggested above.

Except for the aforementioned addresses, IANA SHALL NOT allocate any SSM destination address to a particular entity or application. To do so would compromise one of the important benefits of the source-specific model: the ability for a host to simply and autonomously allocate a source-specific multicast address from a large flat address space.