> but that you have to take account the outside world into consideration when you assign local IPs It was supposed to be this way with IPv4 as well, until we r

> but that you have to take account the outside world into consideration when you assign local IPs It was supposed to be this way with IPv4 as well, until we ran out of addresses. Imagine if we did not have IPv4 address exhaustion and Comcast would give you a full /24. So you have xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255 for your home network. > part of the address comes from some external authority Part of any public IPv4 comes from some external authority, that's what the subnet mask delineates. People are too stuck on NAT and as a result we'll never have a truly decentralized Internet. I will say I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the need for "link-local" stuff - isn't that Layer 2's job?