Policy Proposal 2008-3: Community Networks IPv6 Allocation

[Member Services]

On 21 February 2008, the ARIN Advisory Council (AC) concluded its review
of "Community Networks IPv6 Allocation" and accepted it as a formal
policy proposal with the condition that the policy text be revised by
the author so that it can be put into the ARIN Number Resource Policy
Manual. The author submitted a revised version of the proposal.

The proposal is designated Policy Proposal 2008-3: Community Networks
IPv6 Allocation. The proposal text is below and can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2008_3.html

All persons in the community are encouraged to discuss Policy Proposal
2008-3 prior to it being presented at the upcoming ARIN XXI Public
Policy Meeting. Both the discussion on the Public Policy Mailing List
and at the Public Policy Meeting will be used to determine the community
consensus regarding this policy proposal.

The ARIN Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html

ARIN's Policy Proposal Archive can be found at:
http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html

Regards,

Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


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Policy Proposal 2008-3
Community Networks IPv6 Allocation

Author: Joshua King

Proposal Version: 1

Date: 4 March 2008

Proposal type: new

Policy term: permanent

Policy statement:

[Add Section 2.8 to the NRPM.]

2.8 Community Network

A community network is a generic reference to any network that is
operated by a group of people living in a particular local area
organized for the purposes of delivery or provision of network services
to the residents of an incorporated or unincorporated regional
municipality, city, town, village, rural municipality, township, county,
district or other municipality or other such geographic space, however
designated.

[Modify 6.5.8.1b as follows.]

b. qualify for an IPv4 assignment or allocation from ARIN under the IPv4
policy currently in effect or be a Community Network as defined in
Section 2.8.

Rationale:

There are currently a number of projects globally that aim to develop
community network infrastructure and related technologies. These are
usually coordinated by volunteer-run, grassroots organizations which
lack many of the resources of traditional internet service providers and
other network operators. They have diverse goals, including public
policy, software development, and implementation of community services
and resources. Many of them provide services free of charge, and thus
lack any paying user base. However, in order to create and maintain
community networks that are often composed of hundreds if not thousands
of inexpensive, commodity hosts and devices, a significant amount of
address space will be required. Current-generation workarounds to this
problem, such as NAT, not only make it difficult to develop
next-generation decentralized network technology by segmenting the
community's architecture from the Internet as a whole, but will cease to
be as viable a stopgap as the Internet moves towards IPv6 integration.

Even now, common community networking software solutions such as
CUWiNware (http://www.cuwin.net) and Freifunk (http://www.freifunk.at)
have nascent IPv6 addressing support, but participating organizations
lack the address space for widespread testing or adoption. As such, it
is necessary to implement an procedure as soon as possible for these
segregated networks to acquire address space. These organizations do not
meet the criteria traditionally defined for LIR's, and thus cannot
acquire address allocations through existing templates. By establishing
a procedure by which these organizations can seek to acquire the
resources they require for further development, ARIN can reach out to
this active community and establish a small but definite space for them
in the future of Internet.

Timetable for implementation: Immediate.