Summary

  • William Herrin presented a draft to correct the logarithms and terminology in ARIN's formula for initial IPv6 allocations to ISPs. ARIN staff agreed that the formula and the policy text differed.
  • At ARIN 57 on 21 April 2026, the poll on his draft as written counted 11 in favour and 42 against. The Advisory Council abandoned it in May, citing a preference for removing the formula entirely.

William Herrin walked up to the ARIN 57 microphone with a tidy repair. Section 6.5.2.1c tried to express an IPv6 allocation in CIDR mask bits while feeding it raw counts of sites and customers. Herrin's draft put base-two logarithms where the arithmetic required them. It also made “Provider Allocation Unit” searchable under one name instead of sending readers on a scavenger hunt for “Provider Assignment Unit.” ARIN publishes the draft and its separately labelled staff review on one policy record.

In the Staff and Legal Review section of that record, ARIN conceded the mismatch. Staff said it calculated allocations from the prose rule, not the formula, and could delete the formula without changing operations. Herrin wanted to correct the published expression while a broader rewrite of IPv6 policy took shape. Both sides accepted that his specific edit would leave actual allocations as they were. They disagreed about what belonged in the manual tomorrow morning.

That disagreement gave the meeting its edge. In the 21 April transcript, John Curran pressed Herrin on the relation between the prose rule and its claimed mathematical summary. Kevin Blumberg argued that repairing a long-unused calculation would leave readers doing unnecessary logarithms; he wanted the formula removed. Herrin kept asking whether the room preferred a quick correction while larger work proceeded. It preferred a different job.

The poll asked about the draft as written. ARIN recorded 11 for and 42 against, among a meeting with 151 participants; those two counts were the poll responses, not a ballot cast by every attendee. The Advisory Council's May announcement abandoned the draft for lack of support and expressly cited the preference to remove the formula. A technically correct patch had failed its user test.

Herrin has lived on both sides of the policy page. ARIN's Advisory Council biography says his own garage is multihomed with IPv4 and IPv6 on AS11875. The detail is memorable because it gives the argument a physical address: the policy is read by people who actually route packets, including people whose networks begin at home. At the next day's council meeting, Herrin called Section 6 hard to read and asked about training in public-policy writing. The logarithm had become an editing lesson.