Summary

  • ARIN-2024-10 would have replaced old SWIP-specific wording with “directory services system” and extended the public registration deadline for qualifying IPv4 and IPv6 reassignments and reallocations from seven to fourteen calendar days.
  • Alicia Trotman presented the draft at ARIN 54; later, with Lily Botsyoe as co-shepherd, she moved to abandon it on 21 August 2025 after judging that the extra week lacked community support. The Advisory Council agreed unanimously.

Seven days is a week. Fourteen days is enough time for a second Monday to arrive before an address record becomes public. That small change sat inside a very long title when Alicia Trotman stepped up at ARIN 54 in October 2024. She joked that she had chosen the title herself. Then she had to explain why a tidy-up of registration vocabulary also needed another seven days on the clock.

The ARIN-2024-10 draft dealt with records of address space that an ISP reassigns or reallocates to a customer. The registry's language still named SWIP, a particular way of submitting those records. The proposed text spoke instead of an approved directory services system, folded two IPv4 sections together, and applied a fourteen-calendar-day publication window to qualifying IPv4 records. ARIN staff urged the authors to align IPv6’s deadline too, so organizations handling both protocols would not run two clocks. The final version did so. Trotman was a policy shepherd, not the documented originator of the proposal; at ARIN 54 she shared the assignment with Daniel Schatte, and the later final draft lists Lily Botsyoe beside her.

At the Toronto microphone, the argument quickly moved beyond grammar. If the rule no longer tied compliance to getting fresh IPv4 space from an exhausted free pool, what would happen when a provider simply left customer records unpublished? ARIN president John Curran said enforceable policy needed clear community instructions. Another participant worried that “directory services system” might be broad enough to miss the public Whois record people expected. Trotman had brought a wording repair; the room treated the wording as part of the registry’s operating promise.

At ARIN 55 in April 2025, Botsyoe presented while Trotman joined online. Support for the extra week was real. One speaker described manual registration work; a Caribbean participant argued that small-island administrations move more slowly and would benefit from fourteen days. An ARIN Fellow argued the opposite: operators and law enforcement need current contact records, so seven days should stay. Several speakers liked parts of the cleanup while disagreeing over whether sections should be combined. The extra week had become the easiest line on which to take a side.

By the 21 August council meeting, Trotman had read a more sustained round of mailing-list feedback. She told colleagues that the move from seven to fourteen days looked theoretical to many participants and had no support sufficient to carry this version forward. She moved to abandon the draft. Botsyoe seconded; the council voted unanimously, and ARIN marked the proposal abandoned on 26 August. Trotman had asked the community whether more time would buy better registration. Its final answer was to keep the old clock and let the rewrite go.