Summary

  • For some current account holders, the draft offers more room to expand; a past IPv4 transfer would close that route.
  • A separate pool would be set aside now for a much later IPv6-transition use. APNIC 62 reached no consensus.

Networks use IPv4 addresses to reach services and devices. Imagine a regional operator planning to expand one of its services: the size of its address block can set a limit on that growth. Under prop-168 v004, a current account with a /23 (512 addresses) could seek enough additional space to reach a /22 (1,024 addresses). But a past transfer of IPv4 out of the account would close that proposed route.

For the operator, that history would matter when planning capacity. For other applicants, each extra delegation would change what remains in the finite pool.

Today, APNIC-127 limits an account to a /23 delegation from the 103/8 pool. APNIC also holds a separate /16 for future use. If that block remains unused after the other available space has been delegated, it returns to the pool. These are the current rules; prop-168 has not changed them.

Version 4 of prop-168 would redraw that arrangement in three connected ways. First, an account holder with less than an aggregate /22 could apply for additional space until its combined holdings reached /22. The proposed calculation excludes resources delegated under the Internet Exchange Point, temporary assignment and experimental allocation policies. Second, any account holder that had transferred IPv4 out would become ineligible for further delegations. Third, a new /12 would be reserved for IPv4-to-IPv6 transition. The draft says this reserve would be made immediately, independently of and concurrently with the existing /16.

The draft sets two routes in sequence. First, qualifying current account holders below /22 could request more space. Separately, it would reserve a /12 immediately, but new eligible accounts could receive at most a /24 from it only later—after the existing /16 is released and available space is exhausted. An organization that currently holds, or has ever held, IPv4 would not qualify under the draft unless it had returned that space. A transition-pool delegation could not be transferred and would have to be returned when no longer needed. APNIC could recover it if the holder were not using it for IPv6 transition.

That is more than a change to a maximum. It sets a priority sequence. Current holders may seek additional resources before the special pool becomes usable, while the reserve is ring-fenced for a future class of organizations. A /12 contains 4,096 /24 blocks. That arithmetic shows the scale of the proposed reserve; it does not show how many requests would arrive, when the pool would be activated, or whether the design would meet transition demand.

The version history matters because the proposal’s current landing page carries a Secretariat impact assessment for v003, not v004. That assessment reports that, on 13 August 2026, APNIC held 11,729 /24-equivalent prefixes. It estimates that reserving a /12 would leave 7,633 for general allocation and says that remainder would not meet demand if every eligible APNIC and NIR member applied. The Secretariat also anticipates high application volume and processing delays. These are dated projections tied to v003, not observed outcomes and not a review of v004.

The same assessment exposes questions that the final text must settle. If an account holder receives another delegation, does the five-year transfer lock restart across all covered holdings? How would APNIC distinguish a transfer that disqualifies future requests from a merger or other transaction? Which pool counts as exhausted before the transition /12 becomes available? The v004 text gives one trigger for the transition pool: the existing /16 must be released and then exhausted.

It separately rewrites the waiting-list trigger around exhaustion of the 103/8 pool, even though its definition of “available pool” also includes certain recovered resources. Those triggers need to be read together in implementation guidance.

The question is not whether scarce IPv4 should be conserved or made available. The proposal tries to do both: loosen access for some current account holders and preserve a later bridge for organizations entering the region without a history of IPv4 holdings. The trade-off is that early access can reduce headroom for later applicants, while an early reservation makes less space available to current requests. A five-year transfer lock may constrain the ability to respond to corporate change or network redesign. The text contains rules for some transactions, but the available record does not show how edge cases would be handled in practice.

APNIC 62 did not resolve that trade-off. Its official report says prop-168 did not reach consensus and would return to the Policy SIG mailing list. The status is continued discussion, not adoption or implementation. The governance question is not who can claim to speak for the system. Participation in a policy meeting, or being affected by a rule, does not by itself authorize participants to speak for every account holder. The decision record must make the allocation criteria legible to organizations that were not in the room.

Before this draft could become an operational rule, members and implementers would need a clear account of queue order, reserve accounting, eligibility evidence, review rights and release conditions. The proposal names the intended beneficiaries and several restrictions; the remaining work is to make each trigger auditable and to show how one pool’s use changes the options left to the other.

Sources: APNIC prop-168 v004 · proposal status and v003 impact assessment · APNIC 62 official report · active APNIC-127 policy