Re: "default" IANA policy

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

> Do we have some sort of default policy when
> IANA manages a registry, but the allocation policy
> is not spelled out?

>From RFC 2434:

>  5.  Applicability to Past and Future RFCs
> 
>    For all existing RFCs that either explicitly or implicitly rely on
>    the IANA to evaluate assignments without specifying a precise
>    evaluation policy, the IANA will continue to decide what policy is
>    appropriate. The default policy has been first come, first served.
>    Changes to existing policies can always be initiated through the
>    normal IETF consensus process.
> 
>    All future RFCs that either explicitly or implicitly rely on the IANA
>    to register or otherwise manage assignments MUST provide guidelines
>    for managing the name space.

Note that the IANA has leeway to ask for advice if it is worried or
has questions (this has always been the case for IANA when guidelines
were not written down). So if we think some name spaces are problems
that need fixing, we can advise IANA to go slow and at the same time
go fix things up properly (i.e., by creating a new IANA considerations
document).

Thomas