Policy Block 2: Draft Policy ARIN 2026-1#

Alison Wood (Advisory Council; co-drafted with Brian Jones)

• Why: The most novel thing in the program: a first-of-its-kind proposal to allocate IP address space for networks beyond Earth orbit, with topological aggregation by celestial region. Even in draft form, it signals where hierarchical addressing thought is heading and is tightly coupled to a live IETF working group.
• What: "Taking IP To Other Planets" (TIPTOP) would let ARIN allocate IPv4/IPv6 for extra-terrestrial networks (beyond GEO — the Moon, Mars, Lagrange points), organized hierarchically by celestial region so lunar/planetary prefixes can aggregate into single advertisements back to terrestrial ground stations. Staff's verdict: not implementable as written — it presumes IETF determination that dedicated space is needed, IANA allocation, RIR concurrence on who runs the registry, and a Board mission-scope decision. Meanwhile the IETF TIPTOP WG advanced its use-case and IP-architecture documents, and a joint IPv6 address-space draft (draft-limarsjenwar-tiptop-address-space-00, by Li, Eubanks, Atkinson, Kumari, and Linkova) was published 15 September, asking IANA for dedicated space with suballocation per celestial body and the NRO to determine allocation within celestial bodies.
• How: Policy defines an Extra-Terrestrial Network, a dedicated allocation pool, sparse allocation within the ETN block to allow growth without fragmentation, and utilization exceptions where "active host" verification is impractical (high-latency cold-storage nodes, orbital relays).
• Where applicable: Aspirational and multi-year; contingent on IETF/IANA/NRO process. Watch it as an addressing-architecture thought experiment — aggregation-by-gravity-well is the interesting design idea, and the deep-space transport assumptions (intermittent links, buffering, long delay) are in the WG documents.