Yesterday evening I submitted a policy proposal to ARIN, with the effect of enabling address holders to “lease” IP addresses. Traditionally, an ISP might have provided addresses (for a fee or for free) as part of a network connectivity service. There is currently no policy that mandates that relationship, however, and this policy proposal is an attempt to clarify that no specific relationship is required.

ARIN-prop-132: ISP Sub-assignments Do Not Require Specific Customer Relationships

Proposal Originator: Benson Schliesser

Proposal Version: 1

Date: 11 February 2011

Proposal type: modify

Policy term: permanent

Policy statement:

Section 4.2.1.1 of the NRPM shall be modified to read:

“ARIN allocates blocks of IP addresses to ISPs for the purpose of
reassigning that space to their customers. ARIN does not limit
reassignment by ISPs to their customers based on any criteria except
those that are explicitly described in the NRPM. An ISP is solely
responsible for determining whether an organization is a customer for
the purposes of reassignment under this policy.”

Rationale:

This policy proposal is intended to permit an ISP to enter into
reassignment relationships with anybody they deem to be a customer.
Under this proposal, ARIN will not object to reassignment relationships
because of their business nature. This specifically permits the
reassignment of IPv4 addresses in “lease” relationships between an ISP
and its customers, amongst others.

Timetable for implementation: immediately

After a very long time supporting the NANOG community, MERIT has transitioned ownership of the NANOG property to a newly incorporated group called NewNOG.  My understanding is that NewNOG has initially been funded by a loan from ARIN (which announced the transition today), and has created a new membership structure that should help with ongoing funding.

NANOG participants aren’t required to become NewNOG members. However, participation in the governance of NANOG (via NewNOG) will require membership, including payment of the $100 membership dues. Even if you don’t intend to pursue leadership positions within NANOG, membership will help with ongoing NANOG business following this transition – so, please consider joining NewNOG if you can.

And, of course, many thanks to MERIT for their service to the NANOG community.

Geoff Huston was kind enough to produce a graph of the month-by-month probability of when each RIR will run out of their “normal” IPv4 address pool. As he described in a post to NANOG, this graph assumes that no unusual inter-region activities cause the utilization rate to change. So, things could go differently in reality. But this is a pretty good starting perspective on when member organizations will start being denied new IPv4 address allocations.