Following the exhaustion of IANA's free pool of IPv4 addresses in 2011, when the RIRs received their final /8s, a global policy caused IANA to create a recovered pool of leftover and returned IPv4 address blocks. This policy was ratified by all five RIR communities in 2012 and stated that IANA would begin making equal, periodic allocations from the recovered pool when the first RIR reached a /9 of remaining addresses. This point was reached by LACNIC, the RIR for Latin America and the Caribbean on 20 May, which triggered the global policy and thus the first post-exhaustion allocation from IANA.
Now that the policy is active, the RIPE NCC will receive one-fifth of any recovered addresses in the pool every six months (every March and September). The RIPE NCC will continue to distribute these according to the current last /8 policy, under which LIRs may receive a one-time /22 allocation (1,024 addresses).
With yet another RIR reaching IPv4 exhaustion, it is important that network operators continue to deploy IPv6 on their networks to ensure the future growth of the Internet. More information on IPv6 deployment is available here.