[address-policy-wg] 2010-05 New Policy Proposal (Global Policy for IPv4 Allocation by the IANA post exhaustion)

  Leo Vegoda had a good post on this same topic over on the APNIC list 
that may answer your question:

On Mon 8/16/2010 10:54 AM, Leo Vegoda wrote:
> Hi Philip,
>
> On 16 Aug 2010, at 4:37, Philip Smith wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>>> 5.1 Reclamation Pool
>>>
>>>      Upon adoption of this IPv4 address policy by the ICANN Board of
>>>      Directors, the IANA shall establish a Reclamation Pool to be
>>>      utilized post RIR IPv4 exhaustion as defined in Section 4. The
>>>      reclamation pool will initially contain any fragments that may be
>>>      left over in IANA inventory.
>> I understood that IANA was exhausting its entire pool. Or is exhaustion
>> really just complete /8s? It would be helpful if someone from IANA could
>> clarify as I was under the impression that remaining fragments would be
>> distributed as well, certainly before IANA declared that the cupboard
>> was bare. The remaining fragments are not insignificant.
> I can't speak for the authors but I can describe what we "have in stock" and what the ratified policies allows us to do. The only IPv4 address blocks we have with an UNALLOCATED status are whole /8s. Further, the current policy we implement only allows us to allocate /8s:
>
>     " * The IANA will allocate IPv4 address space to the RIRs in /8 units."
>          -- http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-IPv4-rirs.html
>
> Similarly, the policy for allocating the last blocks required that they be allocated in /8s, too:
>
>     "IANA will automatically allocate the reserved IPv4 allocation units to each RIR (one /8 to each one)"
>         -- http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-remaining-ipv4-space.htm
>
> My personal interpretation of the text above was the the "Reclamation Pool" would only be a potential pool unless and until one of the RIRs found that they no longer needed the IPv4 address space they were recovering and could return it to IANA for re-distribution. If I've misunderstood the authors' intentions I am sure that they will correct me.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Leo Vegoda
> *              sig-policy:  APNIC SIG on resource management policy           *
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On Mon 8/30/2010 2:22 PM, Chris Grundemann wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 14:51, Tore Anderson
> <tore.anderson at redpill-linpro.com>  wrote:
>
>> The proposal says the following:  «The reclamation pool will initially
>> contain any fragments that may be left over in IANA inventory».
>>
>> You didn't comment on it in your first reply, but if these fragments
>> indeed are the unused space in the legacy /8s (I don't know what else
>> they could be), the initial contents of the RP would be some 125.4M
>> addresses, according to Geoff Huston's IPv4 Address Report
>> (http://ipv4.potaroo.net/).  That's a sizable chunk...
> It certainly is.
>
> When this topic came up in our initial conversations, we asked an IANA
> representative about fragments and were told that IANA did not
> currently have any. My understanding is that this may be due to a deal
> that was struck between the IANA and the NRO - but I do not have any
> authoritative information on that at this time.
>
> Geoff Huston's report states that: "At the time IANA reaches the last
> 5 /8s (the "IANA Exhaustion time" as defined by current address
> allocation policies), these unassigned addresses in the legacy /8s are
> then distributed evenly to the RIRs." I am not sure where this
> information came from though, since this is not spelled out in the
> "Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space" policy
> (http://www.icann.org/en/general/allocation-remaining-ipv4-space.htm)
> as far as I can discern.
>
> And of course the IANA report
> (http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml)
> shows all of the "various/legacy" /8s as being administered by
> individual RIRs, since it only has a /8 granularity.
>
> So there is some confusion (on my part at least) as to where these
> fragments currently reside and who has responsibility for them.
> Perhaps if someone from IANA monitors this list they can chime in? If
> not, I and the other authors will certainly be following up to iron
> these fairly significant details out. I apologize for not having a
> more complete answer.

Someone else can likely provide more detail, but my understanding is that 
the various /16s in legacy swamp space (the "various/legacy" listings 
there) are all allocated to (or administered by) individual RIRs, and 
they're just listed that way because the IANA list doesn't show anything 
more granular than a /8.

So, as far as I can tell, the reclamation pool would initially be empty, 
unless/until someone returned something smaller than a /8 to IANA.

-Scott