Incorrect. Blocks allocated prior to ARIN are still maintained in the ARIN database accordingly to community policies. This includes processing contract, updates, being reclaimed, etc.
/John
John Curran President and CEO
ARIN

If it''s registered in the ARIN service region, then its subject to policies developed by the community in this region for transfers. Go to www.arin.net and click on "Got IPv4 Addresses" for details.
Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

The fact that I said it doesn't make it true, but I definitely believe that there will be many organizations running IPv4 internally for years to come, and it's only when its commonplace to use IPv6 will organizations think about turning off IPv4. Your mileage may vary.
/John
President and CEO, ARIN

Steveb - No supreme dictator, but there is an ARIN policy process and *anyone* in the community can submit proposals... https://www.arin.net/policy/pdp.html

Slight difference... ISPs can still get (today) fresh blocks of IPv4 addresses. That *will* end in about one year, and then you'll see layers of NAT as you've never seen them before...

It's true that for the average network manager, IPv6 is likely a non-event for some time. There's no particular reason to upgrade your internal infrastructure to IPv6, unless you run across an application that requires it.
However, the public Internet is going to IPv6; the principle reason it hasn't happened (despite IPv6 being standard and available since 1999) is that the problem solved by IPv6 is running out of globally unique IPv4 addresses, and that's only happening next year. Look at the work being done by Global Crossing, NTT, Verizon, Google, Comcast, Facebook and others and you'll see that this is not a fad, it's a significant change that's going to happen slowly over the next few years.
For this reason, the typical network manager does need to look at the external servers (those outside the wonderful NAT) and decide when they'll add IPv6 addresses to those servers that are IPv4-only today. Why bother adding IPv6? It's simple: new broadband customers globally are going to start being connected via IPv6 (out of necessity) and if you want the same end-to-end connectivity you enjoy today, adding IPv6 to your public servers is the quickest route. The alternative is accessing via central carrier-sized NAT devices, which really have unknown performance at scale. This has audio/video streaming, games, geolocation and other implications.

Petermgreen - We actually agree in one sense: the goal is to make sure that the public *servers* have unique addresses. It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv6. We're not talking about 99% of the home users or servers internal to the corporate firewall, just the public servers. Once there's critical mass in dual-homed public web content, it's possible for fiber/cable/broadband carriers to connect customers with IPv6 and dynamic IPv4 NAT for the remainder of the content.

RLH - Excellent points. Presently, the theory is that if you've got unused address space, you should return it so that other organizations that have need can be assigned it. This actually has happened (again, http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/) but realistically, may not be the most popular route. In 2009, the community adopted a transfer policy which allows one party to transfer their address blocks to another (and be compensated independent of ARIN) but the receiving party has to prove the documented need to receive it. Since there's still addresses in the free pool, there's not a lot of reason for someone to pay when ARIN will provide them directly the same space once they've documented their need. FYI.

Transfers outside of the community adopted policies are fraud, report them here https://www.arin.net/resources/fraud/ and watch the resources be reclaimed. To the extent that you think the policy should/should not be changed, then get involved on the ARIN public policy process https://www.arin.net/participate/index.html. /John

DJB is correct, in that the IETF considered it outside their scope to do a "transition plan for the Internet"... This means that instead of having one standard model for how to get to IPv6, we've seen a veritable parade of transition and coexistence technologies. The combination of no clear transition plan plus no new end-user features makes deployment of IPv6 challenging, and I noted the same thing 15 years ago in RFC 1669. Despite all of the above, IPv6 remains the only viable answer if we want to keep growing the Internet.

We have been working on getting those with unneeded legacy blocks to return them, and have had some success: http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/

You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...