Summary

  • At APNIC 24 in 2007, Haitham El-Nakhal argued for reserving ten final IPv4 /8 blocks at IANA: two for each of the five RIRs. A show of hands favored one over two, and the chair reported no consensus on the global proposal.
  • At AFRINIC-8 in June 2008, he presented a one-/8 version. The African meeting recorded consensus; the eventual global policy, with El-Nakhal among its authors, became active across all five regions.

The argument sounded like arithmetic until the room had to name the loser. At APNIC 24, Haitham El-Nakhal proposed holding back ten /8 blocks from IANA's dwindling IPv4 pool. Each of the five regional registries would have two. Izumi Okutani's competing approach reserved five, one apiece. For a region still bringing new networks online, the difference was a working cushion, not a decorative zero.

The meeting record keeps the disagreement in public view. El-Nakhal said a final reserve would let a registry plan for newcomers and projects while IPv6 adoption was uncertain. Randy Bush distinguished the two-block and one-block plans. Others challenged equal shares, the value of predicting an exhaustion date, and what the registries would do with their last block. During an informal show of hands, a considerable number favored one /8; nobody raised a hand for two. The chair reported no consensus on the global proposal. That was a room signal, not a counted vote by the five regions.

In June 2008, the AFRINIC-8 minutes recorded El-Nakhal presenting the revised one-block plan. They say Africa's earlier two-block approach had reached consensus, but the cross-regional work with JPNIC and other RIRs produced common text for one. Mouhamet Diop objected that late African deployment made the historical distribution unfair. The response in the room was blunt: a global policy had to pass with identical wording in every region. One /8 that all five could approve was preferable to an African demand that left the final guarantee at zero. Chair Vincent Ngundi recorded consensus.

The APNIC prop-055 record names El-Nakhal among the authors of the eventual one-/8 policy and lists its adoption across the five RIRs. This was the IANA-to-RIR distribution rule. It did not decide how AFRINIC or APNIC would later ration addresses among members. The two debates often get shoved into the same “last /8” drawer; they used different keys.

El-Nakhal's visible move was from a regional opening bid to a common floor. The public minutes do not record a private bargain among the authors. They do record the institutional price of a global rule: the African claim to a second final block disappeared from the text that could bind everyone.