Summary

  • Alison Wood and Alicia Trotman shepherded ARIN-2024-9, which removed the special Community Network provisions from ARIN’s Number Resource Policy Manual. The change was implemented on 4 March 2025.
  • The special route once let a community network seek an IPv6 /40 when ordinary LIR allocations started at /36. After a 2020 policy change gave any LIR access to a /40, the special route demanded extra proof for the same size block.

The queue marked “community networks” had become the slow one. In 2017, that label bought a small operator something useful: an IPv6 /40 at a time when an ordinary local internet registry could get no smaller than a /36. Then the general rule changed. By 2020, any LIR could ask for a /40. The special sign remained over its counter, along with a form asking applicants to prove they qualified for the sign. ARIN’s policy record lays out the reversal in two short paragraphs.

Alison Wood was one of the people who finally took down the sign. She and Alicia Trotman shepherded ARIN-2024-9, a proposal to delete the Community Network definition in section 2.11 and its IPv6 allocation path in section 6.5.9. The language sounds like housekeeping until one reads ARIN staff’s review: the special path could require documents, even notarized affidavits, proving an organization provided free or low-cost community access. Ordinary IPv6 allocation criteria were generally easier to satisfy. Operators had no obligation to use the special route. A benefit had become a test of identity with no address-size prize left at the end.

Wood brings an operator’s habits to that sort of contradiction. ARIN’s biography describes her work on the State of Oregon’s wide-area network, serving more than 40,000 customers. Her remit runs from architecture and analytics to testing applications before deployment. The policy manual is an abstraction; the engineer’s question is which counter an applicant actually approaches, and what must be carried there.

She moved the draft to Recommended Draft Policy at the Advisory Council’s September 2024 meeting; Trotman seconded it and the roll-call vote was unanimous. At ARIN 54 the following month, Wood explained the old /36-versus-/40 advantage and the 2020 reversal at speaking speed fast enough to prompt an apology to her Oregon friends. Asked about organizations that already held a /40 through the special route, she answered that their allocations would stay put. She invited community-network operators to speak, then filled the wait for the vote tally with router, IPv6 and TCP jokes. The count came back 59 for, two against. The room had 101 people and 59 remote participants; the tally was a show of support, not a census of every attendee.

The Board adopted the change in December 2024. ARIN implemented it on 4 March 2025. Wood’s small demolition job left a useful lesson: an exception can keep its sympathetic name long after the ordinary rule overtakes it. Check the route, not the ribbon across its entrance.