Summary

  • E. Marie Brierley brought ARIN-2026-3 to ARIN 58: a proposal to retire NRPM 6.4.1, the IPv6 policy sentence saying address space is assigned for use rather than owned.
  • The room moved from a one-sentence edit to the contract behind it. Scott Johnson asked about private ownership; John Curran described rights tied to an ARIN registry entry and how contractual rights can travel.

E. Marie Brierley began by reminding the room that the E in her name is not silent. The policy text was nearly silent by comparison. ARIN-2026-3 proposes to retire one section of the Number Resource Policy Manual: 6.4.1, headed “Address Space Not to be Considered Property.” A clause that once tried to settle the vocabulary of IPv6 rights would leave the policy book.

Brierley said the edit would put IPv6 on the same footing as IPv4 in the manual, where the corresponding property sentence is absent. She pointed to the Registration Services Agreement for the language governing a holder’s rights. The ARIN 58 transcript records her saying that, as of that morning, the policy mailing list had offered no feedback. A microphone was about to be more useful than an inbox.

Kevin Blumberg supported removing policy language that collides with the agreement. Michael Sinatra welcomed the parity and joked that he might stop correcting people who ask him to route a prefix they say they own. Then Scott Johnson asked the expensive question: would deleting the sentence expressly permit private ownership?

John Curran’s answer was a tour of what ARIN can actually promise. He described the right to be associated with a particular entry in its database, and the services and obligations carried by an agreement. Such contractual rights move through sales, estates and bankruptcy. The current RSA, version 14, expressly acknowledges contractual rights in Section 7; its opening definition includes registration rights. The label “property” is much less precise than the rights, the counterparty and the record being discussed.

Brierley’s short draft exposed the longer job. Retiring a sentence in the policy manual leaves the contract, the registry entry and the transfer process doing the practical work. The vote on this proposal has yet to happen; the floor had already found the question its deletion would put on every desk.