Summary

  • On 20 August 2026, ARIN’s Advisory Council advanced ARIN-2025-1 to Recommended Draft Policy status; ARIN announced this on 25 August.
  • The proposal replaces ISP terminology across multiple IPv4 and IPv6 provisions with LIR terminology.
  • It remains under discussion and is neither Board-adopted nor implemented.

The boundaries are explicit: the dates, status and existing numerical rules are facts; the terminology replacements and “Immediate” timetable are proposal claims; the six-month estimate and no-material-change view are ARIN staff assessments; the auditability argument is BTW analysis; community support, Board action and the scale of affected workflows remain unknown.

ARIN’s draft says implementation is “Immediate.” Staff, however, estimate six months if the proposal is adopted, including training and changes to public documentation, internal procedures, guidelines and applications. The statements describe different things: the draft’s proposed timetable and staff’s implementation estimate.

The draft says all ISPs are LIRs, but not all LIRs are ISPs. An LIR may receive resources for customers, end users or infrastructure, including large enterprises, universities and ISPs; an ISP provides Internet services to organisations or individuals beyond its employees. Replacing ISP with LIR across allocation, utilisation, registration and assignment rules is therefore a scope migration, not merely a vocabulary edit.

ARIN staff assess that registry operations and request evaluation would not materially change, and that the text is implementable with no material legal issue. That is an official assessment, not proof that eligibility, obligations or outcomes have already changed. Existing rules—including the automatic IPv4 /24, possible expansion to /22 with a 24-month utilisation plan, 80% aggregate and 50% per-allocation thresholds, and IPv6 nibble-boundary provisions—must not be attributed as newly created by ARIN-2025-1.