Policy Block: Draft Policy ARIN-2026-1: Taking IP To Other Planets (TIPTOP)#

Alison Wood (with Brian Jones), ARIN Advisory Council

• Why: The first formal attempt to recognize off-Earth use cases in any RIR's policy manual, and a genuinely novel addressing problem: how do you allocate IP space for a topology whose "regions" are gravity wells? For anyone who thinks about aggregation and hierarchical addressing, this is a fun and occasionally rigorous stress test of the concepts.
• What: A draft policy, proposed jointly with the IETF TIPTOP working group (see draft-li-tiptop-address-space and draft-many-tiptop-ip-architecture), to let ARIN allocate address space to Extra-Terrestrial Networks (defined as beyond the GEO arc — LEO and GEO excluded). It proposes hierarchically organizing allocations by "Celestial Region" (Moon, Earth-Moon Lagrange points, asteroid belt, planetary systems), prefers IPv6 with a /48 minimum, employs sparse allocation within the ETN block for growth, and relaxes utilization verification where "active host" checks are impractical for high-latency nodes.
• How: Topology-aligned aggregation: agencies currently select space ad hoc from multiple RIRs, forcing disaggregated announcements when deep-space networks interconnect; contiguous per-region blocks would let each gravity well aggregate to a single route advertised back to terrestrial ground stations.
• Where applicable: Not implementable as written — staff and legal review is explicit that it presumes unsatisfied prerequisites: an IETF determination, an IANA allocation, an ARIN Board finding that serving as (even interim) deep-space registry fits ARIN's mission, and concurrence of the other RIRs. Near-term demand is small and specialized. The precedent (first off-Earth recognition in RIR policy) and the routing-scalability framing are the real content.