[arin-ppml] Addressing for other planets

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 6:30 AM Lee Howard <spiffnolee at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is not clear to me that ARIN can or should consider an extra-terrestrial policy without support from the other RIRs.

Hi Lee,

Respectfully, ARIN can and should _consider_ anything germane to
number policy that a member of the community brings before it.
Bottom-up, right? Whether ARIN ultimately acts is a question that
belongs at the other end of the resulting discussions.

Perhaps coordination with other RIRs can wait until there is more
information about which, if any, of the registries _want_ to be part
of the TIPTOP effort?  Figure out who wants a seat at the table before
considering who should have one.


> In other words, I think this should be discussed as a global policy proposal, shepherded by the NRO NC.

It didn't work well for IPv6. The coordinated policy produced was an
impediment to IPv6 uptake for years until the registries individually
reshaped it to meet their respective communities' needs. ARIN went the
other way with inter-RIR transfers -- established its own policy
instead of attempting a global policy. That wasn't perfect either, but
on the whole I'd say it worked out a lot better.


> > Finally, you'd specify that implementation would pend a request from
> > IANA pursuant to publication of the relevant TIPTOP RFC.
>
> I'm pretty sure that RFC7020, and the ASO MoU, mean that requests
> for address allocations from from the ASO. The IETF can establish
> new protocol registries and request protocol numbers, but addresses
> are in the RIR system.

I believe the RFC template still says "IANA considerations" not "ASO
considerations" but I'll defer to folks with greater expertise than I.

Regards,
Bill