The ARIN region continues to move steadily toward IPv4 exhaustion with the total amount of IPv4 address resources available in the free pool being only 1.4 /8 equivalents as of February 3rd, 2014.  It seems very likely that the region will exhaust its free pool of IPv4 numbers by mid-2014.

With the coming exhaustion, a number of community members have submitted policy proposals dealing with a number of exhaustion issues.  ARIN has recently published these new draft policies and they are now open for discussion.

The RIPE region continues to move toward removing “need” (RIPE policy 2013-3) as a requirement for an IPv4 address assignment or allocation.  The working-group chairs recently forwarded the policy to the RIPE NCC for implementation.

In IPv6 news, Comcast’s continues their aggressive deployment of IPv6 and reported in late 2013 that 25% of their Internet customers are now provisioned with dual stack and plans to complete their IPv6 deployment in 2014.  Comcast also noted that they had reached the 75% deployment throughout their broadband network.  Additional commentary on other cable MSOs can be found here.

At the end of the year, the New York Times also published an intriguing interview with Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn about the future of the Internet entitled, Viewing Where the Internet Goes.