Summary

  • Christopher Munz-Michielin’s 2024 prop-159 proposed lowering APNIC’s minimum IPv6 allocation from /32 to /36. His modelled small-LIR case went from A$1,546 to A$2,025 when a /32 IPv6 allocation joined a /23 IPv4 holding.
  • APNIC’s impact assessment counted 650 of 2,776 post-2019 /23 IPv4 recipients with no IPv6 allocation at that time. The proposal failed consensus at APNIC 58 and was abandoned in September 2024.

An IPv6 address is spectacularly small in price per bit. A registry invoice has no interest in price per bit. Munz-Michielin’s prop-159 put those two facts in the same room. Under APNIC’s 2024 fee schedule, his example of a newer local Internet registry holding the maximum /23 IPv4 allocation paid A$1,546 without IPv6. Take the minimum available IPv6 allocation, a /32, and the modelled annual fee became A$2,025. The extra A$479 arrived with a block the operator had to accept at the minimum size.

His answer was a /36. That is sixteen times smaller than a /32, while still containing an enormous number of IPv6 addresses. More important for his proposal, it would keep the example operator below the fee step. He asked APNIC to rewrite both the general minimum and the clause that made an IPv4 allocation holder eligible for IPv6. The proposal aimed at new IPv6 requests; it did not seek to resize existing holders. The pitch was plain: stop making a small operator buy a larger membership tier just to switch on the newer protocol.

APNIC’s impact assessment supplied the useful denominator. Among 2,776 account holders that had taken /23 IPv4 allocations since 2019, 1,321 had also taken /48 IPv6, 805 had taken /32, and 650 had taken no IPv6. The figures do not reveal why those 650 stopped at IPv4. They do show the group at which a fee-and-minimum mismatch could bite. A policy that offers more addresses than a small network needs can still feel like a narrower doorway when the bill is calculated on the block it is handed.

The Secretariat estimated changes to APNIC systems and up to three months of implementation if the policy passed. It never did. The official history records no consensus at APNIC 58 on 6 September 2024. Chairs abandoned the text and invited Munz-Michielin to submit a new version incorporating the feedback. A later proposal by different authors kept the smaller-IPv6-allocation question alive, now wrapped in nibble boundaries and sparse reservations. It did not turn prop-159 into adopted policy or settle its original fee argument.

The interesting number here is A$479, not because every operator owed it, but because it exposed the joint between two rules. Address policy declared a minimum; the fee schedule priced the result. Munz-Michielin tugged on the joint. The room declined his fix, leaving a sharper question for the next draft: if APNIC wants small networks to request IPv6, what size must it hand them, and what should that first step cost?