The IAB is responsible for the contents of the .arpa DNS TLD zone see RFC3172.
RFC 3172 states that the IAB determines which protocol elements are “loaded into” the .arpa domain and the hierarchical structure of such protocol elements. Operational management of subdomains may subsequently be delegated.
In practice, there is a distinction between:
.arpa registry), and.arpa DNS zone).Explicit IAB approval has most commonly been associated with actual changes to the .arpa DNS zone (delegation/provisioning), rather than registry-only actions.
Proposed changes to the .arpa zone will be received by IANA and the IAB will be notified to approve of changes. An IAB member will be selected each year to handle approval requests from IANA. The responsible IAB member will need to approve or handle the request in coordination with the larger IAB. For some, it is trivial (updated IP addresses, etc.) and the approver can just say yes. If the approver doesn't think it is trivial, it would go to the full IAB for discussion or a vote.
To request an entry under the .arpa zone, authors should put a request within the IANA considerations section of the draft. The following RFCs provide examples:
After the document is approved for publication as an RFC, IANA starts the process for performing the IANA actions. They will send a template to the IAB requesting approval for adding the ''.arpa'' domain name.
The content of this page was last updated on 2025-09-03. It was migrated from the old IAB wiki on 2023-12-04.