Dear Colleagues, The RIPE NCC is pleased to announce the publication of a draft of the updated RIPE IPv4 policy document, “IPv4 Address Allocation and Assignment Policies for the RIPE NCC Service Region” (currently ripe-234). We have also published a draft document detailing proposed changes to the “status:" attribute in inetnum objects. Both documents can be downloaded from the "Drafts" section in the RIPE Document Store, found at: <http://www.ripe.net/ripe/draft-documents/> The major updates to the draft IPv4 policy document include the following: - Recent policy changes have been incorporated, including the policy allowing assignments for Internet experiments and the sub-allocation policy. - Wording has been improved to make it easier to read. - The explanation of how to use the database has been removed as a separate "RIPE Database User Manual: Getting Started" was published in September last year. - The document now incorporates the text from "Provider Independent vs Provider Aggregatable Address Space" (ripe-127). - The document now specifies database registration requirements. If the community accepts this document it will replace the existing IPv4 Policy document (ripe-234) and the "Provider Independent vs Provider Aggregatable Address Space" document (ripe-127). The draft document on “status:" attributes proposes changes to the values of “status:" attributes. There is a new “status:" attribute value to support the sub-allocation policy, approved by the RIPE LIR Working Group. New wording is suggested, too. This should make the meaning of “status:" attributes more clear to the majority of Whois users. Feedback on both documents should be sent to the <address-policy-wg@ripe.net> mailing list for a period of five weeks. This review period will end on 28 August 2003. Kind regards, -- leo vegoda RIPE NCC Registration Services Manager