Summary

  • APNIC’s Executive Council minutes put public access to bulk RDAP data among product work planned for the remainder of 2026.
  • Today’s bulk Whois route requires an acceptable-use agreement signed and lodged with APNIC. The published RDAP plan gives no dataset specification or access terms.

APNIC’s registry data is heading for a second bulk door. The first one has a clipboard at the entrance.

In minutes adopted on 19 October, Director General Jia Rong Low told the Executive Council that work through the remainder of 2026 included RDAP improvements and public access to bulk RDAP data. It is a strikingly short line for a consequential change. A query service answers one resource at a time. A bulk dataset lets an operator, researcher or auditor compare a population, find mismatches and track change without stitching together individual lookups.

APNIC already offers bulk Whois access, but its current page requires requestors to sign an acceptable-use agreement and lodge it with the registry. The agreement restricts uses of the data. “Public” in the RDAP plan therefore raises a practical question: which records will be obtainable, by whom and under what conditions? The council minutes answer none of those points.

The difference between protocols is real. APNIC’s RDAP guide describes a standardised, internationalisation-aware query service for IP addresses and AS numbers. The existing page shows per-resource requests. It gives no bulk endpoint, schema or reuse rule. A JSON label alone cannot tell a user whether contact fields will be omitted, how often a snapshot will refresh, or how it will relate to the signed Whois download.

There is also a tempting historical shortcut to avoid. APNIC’s Whowas service uses an RDAP extension to expose earlier registration states. That is a separate service. Nothing in the council’s bulk-data sentence says that the new download will carry history.

The planned opening has a clear test. Publish the included object and field list, redaction policy, licence or use terms, refresh schedule, stable location and a way to identify one release against the next. Until those exist, “public bulk RDAP” is a boardroom direction, not a data product people can build against. APNIC has opened the conversation about the door. Users still need to see its hinges.