Which statement about private IP address ranges is true?

• A. They are globally routable on the internet.
• B. They are not routable on the public internet.
• C. They are assigned by IANA to every device.
• D. They must be unique across the entire internet.

Answer: (B)

Private IP address ranges are reserved for use inside private networks. They are not routable on the public Internet, meaning routers on the Internet do not forward packets to or from these addresses. This is intentional so organizations can use the same private addressing inside many different networks without collision. When devices with private addresses need to reach the Internet, they pass through a gateway that performs Network Address Translation (NAT), translating the private addresses to a public IP address or pool of addresses.

Because these ranges are private, they can be reused in many separate networks, so they do not have to be globally unique across the Internet. The assignment of private addresses isn’t done to individual devices by IANA; instead, the ranges are reserved for private use (for example, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16), and devices obtain addresses from their local DHCP server or static configuration within the private network.