Summary

  • Christopher Hawker entered APNIC policy discussion in 2023 after years of dealing with the registry mainly as a requester of Internet number resources. He went on to author prop-156 for temporary assignments.
  • The published rule lets eligible events seek IPv4, IPv6 and an ASN for no more than six months. The trip from practical problem to policy text ran through a public meeting, criticism, consensus and implementation.

The address counter had another door

To an operator building a network, the registry can look like a counter: submit the form, collect the numbers, get back to the routers. Christopher Hawker says that was once his own view of APNIC. In his first-person account for the APNIC Blog, he describes arriving at policy discussion in August 2023, realizing the rules were open to participants, and noticing that some of those rules fitted operating practice badly. The address counter had another door. He walked through it.

Hawker had the background to recognize the problem. An APNIC 60 nominee page identifies him as a systems administrator with experience across corporate and smaller carrier networks. The page is a contemporary nomination record, not an election result. His own account is more revealing than a title: he says drafting the proposal was easier than standing up to present it. APNIC 57 was the room where the technical grievance had to become a community rule.

The result was prop-156, an assignment path for numbers needed for a while, then returned. A conference can build a real network and still have a closing date. Under APNIC-127-v015, Part 6, temporary assignments may support conferences, workshops, SIG meetings and other approved purposes for at most six months. APNIC reserves a /21 of IPv4, a /29 of IPv6 and eight ASNs for the policy. Most individual grants stay at or below /24 IPv4, /32 IPv6 and one ASN unless greater need is demonstrated.

The conference clause makes the move from idea to rule tangible. An applicant must submit a draft program no later than six weeks from the start of the event and explain why numbers are needed. A group without its own APNIC account can nominate an existing account holder to handle the technical requirements. Those are working instructions for the people who have to bring up a network before the doors open.

In Hawker's telling, the Open Policy Meeting brought both support and criticism. APNIC's proposal history records version one in December 2023, a revision in January 2024 and consensus at APNIC 57 in March. The Executive Council endorsed it in June; APNIC published the policy in February 2025. The operational question had traveled through a process that could ask him to show his work.

Original records