Summary

  • Dean Pemberton and Geoff Huston's prop-110-v002 proposed giving APNIC's quarantined 1.2.3.0/24 to the Secretariat for locally scoped DNS resolver anycast. APNIC's text said the block was unsuitable for ordinary distribution because it attracted unsolicited traffic.
  • The proposal history records Policy SIG consensus on 27 February 2014, failure to reach consensus at the Member Meeting on 28 February, author withdrawal on 4 March and abandonment on 9 March. The APNIC 37 report confirms the split decision.

The block was famous for the wrong reason. Addresses such as 1.2.3.4 had been used without authorization as if they were private space, so packets kept arriving at a destination nobody could safely hand to an ordinary customer. APNIC quarantined the covering 1.2.3.0/24. Pemberton and Geoff Huston saw an odd opportunity: use the dirty block as a memorable address for locally scoped DNS resolvers, with anycast nodes answering nearby users.

Their version 2 proposal asks APNIC to designate the /24 for the Secretariat rather than a single account holder. It says quality testing found 95% of the wider 1.0.0.0/8 suitable for delegation. Before any allocations, that /8 drew 140–160 Mbps of sustained unsolicited traffic and bursts above 800 Mbps. Those are measurements for the whole /8, not a measured rate for 1.2.3.0/24. The /24 was one quarantined hotspot within the broader problem.

The proposal's selling point was nearly its warning label. A resolver could be advertised under route scope controls so the junk traffic stayed manageable, and users could remember the address. But the authors also wrote down the failure mode: if an anycast route escaped its local scope, unwanted traffic could reach the resolver behind that leaked advertisement and hurt the DNS service. Reusing a bad address would require both a routing boundary and an operator willing to hold it.

The institutional clock was faster than the routing plan. The Policy SIG said yes on 27 February 2014. The next day the Member Meeting did not reach consensus, according to the official report. Pemberton and Huston withdrew the text on 4 March; APNIC marked it abandoned on 9 March. The public proposal record does not identify a decisive objection at the Member Meeting. A meeting transcript or minutes naming one would change that account. What remains certain is the split: technical-room support did not become an APNIC rule.