Summary

  • ARIN-2025-8 would add “within the ARIN service area” to Section 4.10’s sentence reserving IPv4 space for IPv6 deployment.
  • The proposal does not change allocation size, eligibility or the pool’s purpose; ARIN staff says current request processing already requires in-region use.
  • The missing operational question is temporal: which allocations were processed under the new rule, and which earlier allocations remain grandfathered?

The policy text is dated 14 July 2025. It was accepted as a Draft Policy on 21 August and announced on 26 August 2025. The Advisory Council advanced it to Recommended Draft Policy on 22 April 2026, and ARIN announced that status through PPML on 27 April. The latest Advisory Council meeting listed on the policy page is 20 August 2026. At the 5 September 2026 UTC reporting freeze, the proposal remained under discussion: it was not last call, Board-adopted or implemented.

Section 4.10 concerns reserved IPv4 space dedicated to facilitating IPv6 deployment. ARIN’s current text has no out-of-region restriction beyond the general restrictions in Section 9, although staff has interpreted the pool’s intended use as in-region. The proposed replacement sentence adds only the words “within the ARIN service area.” The frozen record says the change does not alter the size formula, applicant eligibility or purpose of the reserved space. Staff characterizes it as codifying existing processing practice.

The Advisory Council says the recommended draft conforms to ARIN’s policy principles. It attributes a small-subset ambiguity concern to community participants, then says subsequent PPML discussion and ARIN 57 follow-up produced no further ambiguity concerns or alternative wording. Staff assesses the proposal as implementable as written, with no impact on registry operations or services and no material legal issue. Staff separately estimates three months for training, public-document updates and internal procedures. That estimate must not be confused with the draft’s “Immediate” timetable.

A policy-page comment attributes to staff an intention not to extend the restriction to Section 4.10 allocations assigned before implementation. That is an attributed comment about intended treatment—not wording in the proposed sentence and not a finalized grandfathering rule. Adoption, an implementation date, the number of affected allocations, individual request outcomes and any public grandfathering register remain unknown. The sources establish no enforcement outcomes.

That is why the short geographic edit needs a companion record. If adopted, ARIN should retain the policy version and effective date for each relevant request, together with a decision label such as “prospective” or “grandfathered.” A public aggregate audit trail could show how the boundary is being applied without exposing recipient-level information. The recommendation is for an auditable design, not a claim that such records or enforcement already exist.

Publication note: Published is the scheduled date, 6 September 2026. The actual server timestamp remains unset until the production publish action.