LAST CALL - Draft Policy ARIN-2012-6: Revising Section 4.4 C/I Reserved Pool Size

[ARIN]

The ARIN Advisory Council (AC) met on 20 December 2012 and decided to
send the following draft policy to last call:

    Draft Policy ARIN-2012-6: Revising Section 4.4 C/I Reserved Pool Size

The AC revised the text after the ARIN XXX Public Policy Meeting and 
asked for an updated staff assessment of the revised text. The 
assessment is available at: 
https://www.arin.net/policy/archive/2012_6_staff_assessment.html

Feedback is encouraged during the last call period. All comments should
be provided to the Public Policy Mailing List. Last call for 2012-6 will
expire on 15 January 2013. After last call the AC will conduct their
last call review.

The draft policy text is below and available at:
https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/

The ARIN Policy Development Process is available at:
https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html

Regards,

Communications and Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


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Draft Policy ARIN-2012-6
Revising Section 4.4 C/I Reserved Pool Size

Date: 27 December 2012

Policy statement:

4.4. Micro-allocation ARIN will make IPv4 micro-allocations to critical 
infrastructure providers of the Internet, including public exchange 
points, core DNS service providers (e.g. ICANN-sanctioned root and ccTLD 
operators) as well as the RIRs and IANA. These allocations will be no 
smaller than a /24. Multiple allocations may be granted in certain 
situations.

Exchange point allocations MUST be allocated from specific blocks 
reserved only for this purpose. All other micro-allocations WILL be 
allocated out of other blocks reserved for micro-allocation purposes. 
ARIN will make a list of these blocks publicly available.

Exchange point operators must provide justification for the allocation, 
including: connection policy, location, other participants (minimum of 
two total), ASN, and contact information. ISPs and other organizations 
receiving these micro-allocations will be charged under the ISP fee 
schedule, while end-users will be charged under the fee schedule for 
end-users. This policy does not preclude exchange point operators from 
requesting address space under other policies.

ARIN will place an equivalent of a /16 of IPv4 address space in a 
reserve for Critical Infrastructure, as defined in section 4.4. If at 
the end of the policy term there is unused address space remaining in 
this pool, ARIN staff is authorized to utilize this space in a manner 
consistent with community expectations.

ICANN-sanctioned gTLD operators may justify up to the equivalent of an 
IPv4 /23 block for each authorized new gTLD, allocated from the free 
pool or received via transfer, but not from the above reservation. This 
limit of a /23 equivalent per gTLD does not apply to gTLD allocations 
made under previous policy.

Rationale:

Additional ICANN-sanctioned DNS infrastructure is being added to the 
Internet and in quantities greater than anticipated when the micro 
allocation proposal was written and adopted.

The original CI pool was created to serve new IXP and new CI 
requirements. The pending need is estimated to be over 1000 new gTLD 
range, which may exhaust the current /16 reservation before the ARIN 
free pool is exhausted. Once the current /16 reservation is exhausted, 
CI providers would no longer be eligible to receive address space, 
either via the general free pool or via transfer.

The original proposal dealt with this by expanding the reservation to a 
/15 and allowing CI to draw from the free pool instead of the 
reservation until it gets down to a /8. The consensus coming out of the 
Dallas meeting seems to be that this is an inadequate solution. As the 
new expanded gTLD demand will obliterate any reasonable reservation, 
leaving no resources for the other IXP and CI demands that the original 
reservation was intended to serve. It is therefore, not possible to 
services them both out of a common reservation.

In order to ensure continued access to IPv4 number resources by new IXP 
and DNS operators alike, the AC is modifying the proposal going into 
last call to allow gTLD operators to continue to qualify for micro 
allocations from the general free pool or via transfer only, and leaving 
one /16 reserved for IXP, root, and ccTLD DNS operators.

As a result of the close examination of the CI policy brought about by 
this proposal, the AC has identified a number of issues in the original 
policy text that should be addressed. However, the AC is intentionally 
minimizing the overall changes to this proposal as much as possible for 
last call in keeping with the spirit of the PDP. The AC intends to make 
future proposals to deal with these other concerns. The current proposal 
addresses issues of some urgency and we did not want to delay it to 
another policy cycle as a result.