[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2024-8: Restrict the Largest Initial IPv6 Allocation to /20

[ARIN]

On 20 June 2024, the ARIN Advisory Council (AC) accepted “ARIN-prop-335: Restrict the Largest Initial IPv6 Allocation to /20” as a Draft Policy.

Draft Policy ARIN-2024-8 is below and can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/drafts/2024_8/

You are encouraged to discuss all Draft Policies on PPML. The AC will evaluate the discussion to assess the conformance of this draft policy with ARIN's Principles of Internet number resource policy as stated in the Policy Development Process (PDP). Specifically, these principles are:

* Enabling Fair and Impartial Number Resource Administration
* Technically Sound
* Supported by the Community

The PDP can be found at:

https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/pdp/

Draft Policies and Proposals under discussion can be found at: https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/drafts/


Regards,

Eddie Diego
Policy Analyst
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


Draft Policy ARIN-2024-8: Restrict the Largest Initial IPv6 Allocation to /20

Problem Statement:

In order to promote aggregation, the NRPM currently allows initial allocations up to a /16. However, the entire IPv6 address space only contains 65536 /16s, and the space allocated to IANA for globally routable purposes only contains 8192 /16s. Therefore, a /16 is a sufficiently large portion of the IPv6 address space that the goal of conservation starts to outweigh the goal of aggregation.

Policy statement:

6.5.2.1b: Replace "In no case shall an ISP receive more than a /16 initial allocation." with "In no case shall a LIR receive more than a /20 initial allocation."

Comments:

A quick look at ARIN's stats shows that only a single IPv6 allocation exceeds a /20 in size:

grep "ipv6" delegated-arin-extended-latest  | grep allocated | cut -d '|' -f 5 | sort | uniq -c
      1 16
      8 20
     22 22
     39 24
      2 27
    127 28
     15 29
      6 30
     21 31
   4236 32
      1 33
      2 35
   1401 36
      1 37
      1 38
   1050 40
     11 41
     13 42
      9 43
    851 44
     16 45
     15 46
     26 47
   1754 48

Timetable for implementation: Immediate