[address-policy-wg] 2016-03 New Policy Proposal (Locking Down the Final /8 Policy)

> On 6 Jun 2016, at 22:54, Aleksey Bulgakov <aleksbulgakov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Why are we talking about 185./8 only?

We are not. You might be though. :-)

Current policy applies to ALL IPv4 address space held by the NCC. Or that may be obtained by the NCC somehow, say because it was returned by an LIR or a future allocation from IANA of freshly reclaimed space.

This policy has been commonly called “last /8” as a sort of shorthand by the community. Sadly, this name is misleading. Some have assumed the policy only applies to allocations made by the NCC out of its last /8: 185/8. It doesn’t. It applies to all allocations from now on regardless of which chunk of a /8 held by the NCC gets chosen to issue a one-time-only /22 to an LIR.

The policy became known as “last /8” because it came into effect as soon as the NCC had to make an allocation from its final /8 allocation from IANA. ie An LIR's request was too big to be satisfied from a block elsewhere in the NCC’s pool of available space and therefore had to come from an allocation out of 185/8. At that point, the previous policy of needs-based allocation ended and LIRs could only get a single /22.