Hi, On 30 Aug 2010, at 2:22, Chris Grundemann wrote: [...]
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.
Yes, the RIRs agreed a split for the old "Various Registries" space between themselves. They wrote to us about it in 2008 and a copy of the message and the breakdown is published on the ICANN web site: http://www.icann.org/correspondence/wilson-to-conrad-28jan08-en.pdf
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.
This is presumably an address management practice agreed by the NRO rather than a matter of policy. Regards, Leo Vegoda