Summary

  • ARIN published Draft Policy ARIN-2026-5 for discussion on 22 September. It would define out-of-region use as sole use outside the ARIN service region and exempt simultaneous use inside and outside it; it is not adopted policy.
  • The text does not say whether “a given ARIN resource” is an allocation, a delegated child block, an announced prefix, an address or service, or an ASN. Those units can produce different geographic classifications for the same network.
  • Any eventual decision should preserve a classification receipt: exact resource and parent-child boundaries, policy version, unit, observation interval, evidence basis, regional observations, uncertainty, staff interpretation and review lineage.

“Sole” becomes precise only after the noun is measured

ARIN’s new draft is only two sentences long. That brevity gives it force. Draft Policy ARIN-2026-5 would define Out Of Region Use as the sole use of ARIN-allocated resources outside the ARIN service region. It then says the definition does not apply when a given ARIN resource is used simultaneously inside the ARIN region and in other RIR service regions.

The Advisory Council accepted the proposal as a Draft Policy on 17 September, and ARIN announced the draft on 22 September. Its status is Under Discussion. The wording is not an operative rule, and no current request can be described as having been decided under it.

The unresolved question sits inside the phrase “a given ARIN resource.” A binary test such as sole versus simultaneous use needs an object. Is the object the block ARIN originally allocated? A reallocation or reassignment recorded beneath it? The prefix visible in a routing table? One address used by a service? Or, when the resource is an ASN, the number across every router on which it appears?

Those are not interchangeable units. Consider a hypothetical /20. One /24 is used inside the ARIN service region; other child prefixes are used elsewhere. At the /20 allocation level, there is simultaneous use. At the level of a foreign-only child prefix, there may be sole use outside. Nothing about the network changed between those two answers. Only the measuring frame did.

The current NRPM makes the distinction possible but does not settle it for this draft. Section 2.5 calls an allocation a block of IP addresses issued from ARIN and treats reallocations and reassignments as sub-delegations. Section 2.17 includes ranges or blocks of contiguous addresses and ASNs within Internet Number Resources. The draft borrows the broad word “resources” without choosing among those registered layers.

The proposal’s editing history makes the choice more important. Proposal 353 referred to sole “use or advertisement” outside the region and exempted use or advertisement inside plus other geographic locations. The draft removes “advertisement,” introduces “a given ARIN resource,” and refers to other RIR service regions. Removing advertisement avoids equating one routing observation with use. It also leaves the evidence for use to be specified elsewhere.

Routing data can contribute to a receipt without becoming geography itself. A route collector can observe a prefix and an origin ASN. It generally does not prove where every service instance sits, where traffic is handled, or who exercises operational control. RFC 4786 describes anycast as the same service address being available at multiple discrete autonomous locations. One address can therefore be simultaneously present across regions even though an observer sees one identifier. Conversely, a facility record alone does not prove that every address in the parent allocation is used there.

Section 9 supplies the consequence that makes granularity more than a drafting nicety. Current policy allows out-of-region use to justify additional resources when an organisation has a real and substantial connection with the ARIN region and uses the same type of resource there. The manual gives an in-region IPv4 /22, IPv6 /44, or an ASN on a peering interconnection or router as examples.

A separate proposal, ARIN-2025-3, is now a Recommended Draft Policy. It would lower the IPv4 example from /22 to /24 and exclude the waitlist, micro-allocation and §4.10 channels from that justification. ARIN staff’s 11 September review warned that one in-region /24 could support a much larger block intended for use entirely outside the region. That is a threshold and exposure question. ARIN-2026-5 adds a prior classification question: at what resource unit does “entirely” get tested?

The two proposals should not be collapsed. One changes the qualifying threshold and available channels. The other supplies a definition. Yet an implementation may have to apply both to the same evidence. If the definition is evaluated at allocation level, one in-region child prefix may make the parent simultaneous-use. If it is evaluated independently for every child prefix, some children may be out-of-region while the parent is not. An applicant, staff reviewer and later auditor need to know which proposition was decided.

The remedy is not a universal geolocation oracle. It is a modest classification receipt. Name the exact identifier and its parent and child boundaries. State whether the unit is an allocation, reallocation, reassignment, announced prefix, address or service, or ASN. Fix the observation interval and the maximum age of evidence. List the evidence types used: registry records, routing observations, facility or router evidence, service configuration, and applicant attestation. Preserve conflicting and unavailable evidence instead of rounding it into a clean answer.

The receipt should also carry the policy version and staff interpretation. A later wording change can then be applied prospectively without pretending that the earlier decision used the new rule. Review and appeal can contest a named unit rather than reverse-engineer an invisible assumption.

Draft status is the best time to make that assumption visible. “Sole” can remain a bright line. But the line belongs around a declared object, during a declared interval, on declared evidence. Otherwise the same estate can cross it merely because one reviewer drew the box around a /20 and another drew it around a /24.

Sources