This confusion has been haunting the final /8 policy from day one - it was never about what to do with specifically 185/8, but what to do with all future allocations from the moment we needed to start allocating out of it. The policy text itself was never limited to a single /8, nor was that limitation any part of the discussion.

I looked up the policy proposal at https://www.ripe.net/participate/policies/proposals/2010-02 " This proposal describes how the RIPE NCC should distribute IPv4 address space from the final /8 address block it receives from the IANA."

Reading the rest of the proposal I fully understand the confusion and find it hard to read your interpretation into the proposal. The updated policy after this proposal can be found in RIPE 509 https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-509#----use-of-last----for-pa-allocations * The following policies come into effect as soon as RIPE NCC is required to make allocations from the final /8 it receives from the IANA. It does not discuss the event where RIPE NCC gets more address space and could allocate from - which would strictly speaking not be allocation from the last /8

somewhere along the way, I think, but haven't found it yet, it was said that this policy would get activated when they got the last /8 from IANA, that was the intention. Whatever happend after _that_ point in time, would be covered by that policy. That part was to cover what you mention next...

Tracing the policy text trough the versions - This text was first removed between * RIPE 599 published on 20 December 2013 https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-599#Use-last-for-PA-Allocations and * RIPE 604 - published on 4 Feb 2014: https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-604 Where the text was changed to: The size of the allocation made will be exactly one /22. The sum of all allocations made to a single LIR by the RIPE NCC after the 14th of September 2012 is limited to a maximum of 1024 IPv4 addresses (a single /22 or the equivalent thereof).

The side story behind this is probably related to that it was assumed that IANA would get some address space back, address space they again could redistribute to the LIR. When slized up it would at some point not be possible to hand out /22's, only smaller blocks that could add upto a /22. All that would be addresses covered by "the last /8 policy", the runout policy.

The intention was that once the policy was activated it would be there for all future until there was no IPv4 left. It was just called "the last /8 policy" since that's how it started out, the activation point. (I can't find referenced to all of this but it is somewhere in the archives, and guess Geert or you can find it all? Wonder if it might be somewhere in the IETF space or so this was discussed to?)

Ing. Riccardo Gori
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