This document provides a background report on the progress of an active Global Policy proposal, "Global Policy Proposal for Post Exhaustion IPv4 Allocation Mechanisms by IANA". It is intended as a background briefing for the ICANN Board and the wider community.
Global Internet Number Resource Policies are defined by the ASO MOU - between ICANN and the NRO - as "Internet number resource policies that have the agreement of all RIRs according to their policy development processes and ICANN, and require specific actions or outcomes on the part of IANA or any other external ICANN-related body in order to be implemented". Attachment A of this MOU describes the Development Process of Global Internet Number Resource Policies, including the adoption by every RIR of a global policy to be forwarded to the ICANN Board by the ASO1, as well as its ratification by the ICANN Board. In this context, the ICANN Board adopted its own Procedures for the Review of Internet Number Resource Policies Forwarded by the ASO for Ratification.Among other features, these Procedures state that the Board will decide, as and when appropriate, that ICANN staff should follow the development of a particular global policy, undertaking an "early awareness" tracking of proposals in the addressing community. To this end, staff should issue background reports periodically, forwarded to the Board, to all ICANN Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees and posted at the ICANN web site.
At its meeting on 21 April 2011, the Board resolved to request tracking of the development of a "Global Policy for post exhaustion IPv4 allocation mechanisms by the IANA", under discussion in the addressing community. The status overview presented below is compiled in response to this request and will be further updated as developments proceed, for information to ICANN entities and the wider community. This is the third background report on this proposal.
The purpose of the proposal is to enable IANA to allocate returned IPv4 blocks to RIRs. IANA would place IPv4 blocks returned by the RIRs in a Recovered IPv4 Pool. This Pool would be declared active when one RIR has less than half its last /8 left. IANA would then allocate an "IPv4 allocation unit" (minimum size /24) to each RIR, if the Pool size so permits. If the space available in the Pool is too limited, allocation would be deferred in 6 month intervals until space is available.
Following list discussions over slightly different drafts early in 2011, the current version of this global policy proposal was first formally introduced in the APNIC region on 20 February 2011 and has since been introduced and advanced in all the other RIRs. The proposal has been adopted in APNIC, LACNIC and RIPE and has passed final call in AfriNIC and ARIN.
Process history
On 3 February 2011, the ASO AC2 recognized the proposal as fulfilling the formal requirements as a candidate for a Global Policy.
Once the proposal has been adopted in all RIRs, i.e. AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE, the proposal will be handled by the NRO EC3 and the ASO AC according to their procedures before being submitted to the ICANN Board for ratification.
As a background to this policy proposal, it should be noted that a previous proposal for handling recovered IPv4 address space, "Global Policy Proposal for the Allocation of IPv4 Blocks to Regional Internet Registries" was introduced in 2009 but abandoned by the NRO EC in view of version differences across the RIRs.
This announcement was sourced from :
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-26apr11-en.htm