Summary

  • Leif Sawyer presented ARIN-2025-1, a recommended draft that replaces many ISP references with LIR. At ARIN 58, Lee Howard tested the new vocabulary from a newcomer’s position and Adair Thaxton found the glossary points from LIR to ISP but not explicitly back.
  • ARIN staff expects six months of updates to documents, guidance and applications if the draft is adopted. The live test for that work is simple: a reader searching “ISP” should reach the rules now filed under “LIR.”

ARIN wants to move the rules to a different shelf. The label on the old shelf stays. The arrow between them is the awkward part. At ARIN 58, Leif Sawyer introduced a rewrite that substitutes “Local Internet Registry,” or LIR, for “Internet Service Provider,” or ISP, across much of the Number Resource Policy Manual. He described the industry relationship neatly: ISPs fall within LIRs, while the broader LIR class also includes other organizations that distribute numbers to customers. Then Lee Howard asked him to define LIR as if it were his first ARIN meeting.

Sawyer gave a plain answer: an LIR receives Internet number resources and provides them to a downstream customer base. Adair Thaxton tried the next step, the one any reader would take at a search box. Sawyer had said the remaining ISP definition would help people find themselves under LIR. Thaxton noticed the actual text runs the other way. The proposed ARIN-2025-1 wording names ISPs inside the LIR definition; the proposed ISP definition describes service providers without an explicit LIR pointer. Sawyer acknowledged that he had flipped the terminology in his explanation.

That small reversal matters because the proposal changes many headings and operative references. A university or large enterprise can be an LIR under the draft without being an ISP. An ISP searching the old term should still be able to find the allocation and reassignment rules filed under the new one. The navigation problem starts at the search box: the familiar word reaches a glossary entry, and the reader must work out where the governing rule went.

Sawyer had identified this job years earlier. In ARIN’s 2017 voter guide, he said the NRPM needed language cleanup so members could use it more easily. Nine years later, the room handed him a wonderfully specific acceptance test: type ISP; follow the result; reach LIR. ARIN staff says the current draft would require roughly six months of work across public documentation, internal guidance, training and applications, while leaving request evaluation materially unchanged.

The room counted 86 hands for the recommended draft and none against. The Advisory Council still has its decision to make. Sawyer’s shelf move will be judged in a humbler place: the first time a newcomer finds the rule without asking a veteran which acronym hides it.