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Category Archives: IANA

IANA Contract Awarded to ICANN

After a withdrawal in the contracting process in March, the US Government via the National Telecommunication & Information Administration (NTIA) renewed its contract with ICANN for the IANA operations functions earlier this month.  The new contract begins in October of 2012 with an initial 3 year term.  Two 2-year terms are included as options in the contract.  There was some speculation back in March as to the reasoning behind the awkward process, but a reset appears to have renewed the contract as was originally expected.

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2012/commerce-department-awards-contract-management-key-internet-functions-icann

Copies of the contract are linked from the NTIA’s website for those who want to dig into the details of the new agreement.

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/other-publication/2012/icann-proposal

ICANN has also posted their proposal to the US Department of Commerce on their website.

http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-2-09jul12-en.htm

 

ARIN Returns IPv4 Addresses to IANA

After the adoption of the Global Policy for Post Exhaustion of IPv4 resources by the ICANN board, the ARIN board has decided to return to IANA some of the resources that it had received back from legacy address address holders.  All of this space is the equivalent of a /8.  The largest part of this block came from Interop who returned almost a /8 to ARIN in 2010.  The long-term effect of this will bring ARIN’s IPv4 exhaustion date closer to RIPE’s exhaustion date which is expected this year.

From: Geoff Huston’s IPv4 Address Report

Presumably IANA will now proceed to reallocate this address space to all 5 RIRs according to the global policy.  However, given that some RIRs currently have a sufficient free pool one would expect them to decline the reallocation of space, thus a majority of the space seems likely to go to either APNIC or RIPE.  APNIC’s current IPv4 policy, however, would only allow blocks of size /22 or smaller to be allocated.

From a practical perspective, it seems like it would have been more reasonable for ARIN to just return the largest blocks and reallocate the small blocks to new or existing IPv4 address holders.  However, the final /8 allocations process by chance ended up giving ARIN a much larger supply than was needed compared with the other RIRs.  Thus, it seems likely the ARIN board felt compelled to “right this wrong” as well as to continue its previously existing operational procedure to return to IANA IPv4 space received from organizations prior to ARIN’s formation.

 

IANA Contract renewal – any effect on the IP address world?

On March 10th, the US Department of Commerce, through the NTIA, released a statement that they were cancelling the RFP for the renewal of the IANA contract.  ICANN was seen as the “shoe-in” to receive this contract but according to various reports the process was cancelled because the USG felt the bid did not meet the specifications of the expanded RFP.  There is plenty of speculation about what is happening, specifically around the expansion of the global Top Level Domains (gTLDs), but only time will tell how the contract renewal plays out.  As a result of the cancellation, the existing contract with ICANN for the IANA services was renewed for 6 months presumably to start the process over or to step back from the current structure and look at some new structure.

So what does this have to do with IP addresses, isn’t ICANN all about DNS?  Well to the largest extent ICANN’s main coordination has been about the DNS, but the last “N” in ICANN has always been “Numbers.”

What does this potentially mean for the RIRs?  Since most of the RIRs were formed before ICANN existed, there has always been a bit of an arms length relationship between the RIRs and ICANN.  The current relationship is governed by an MOU that was signed in 2004 between ICANN and the NRO.   Under the current agreement the NRO acts as the ICANN ASO – Address Supporting Organization.  To date, the role of the ASO has been limited largely to certifying global IP number policies (which direct IANA to perform functions related to IP numbers) and appointing two seats to the ICANN board.  Does this open an opportunity for the  RIRs & NRO to part ways from ICANN and move forward by allowing the NRO to become a global coordinating body?  Or is this just another hurdle in the development of “Internet Governance”?

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