Summary

  • In 2011, Izumi Okutani and Terence Zhang Yinghao challenged a one-year renumbering promise attached to an LIR's first APNIC allocation. The promise had made sense when APNIC could replace the addresses the LIR borrowed from an upstream provider.
  • APNIC's final IPv4 /8 limited that first allocation to a /22. The revised prop-094 removed the promise for this phase, after a meeting challenge pushed the authors beyond their initial 80% usage exception.

Imagine asking for 1,024 new IPv4 addresses and receiving an instruction to surrender the 2,048 that keep your network running. That was the snag Izumi Okutani carried into the APNIC 31 policy meeting. A /22 contains 1,024 addresses; a /21 contains 2,048. The figures were an example from the debate, not a count of actual applicants. The paperwork, however, was real: a new LIR seeking its first direct allocation had to promise to renumber out of previously used upstream space within one year.

Under the earlier allocation system, the promise had a bargain behind it. APNIC could give an LIR enough portable space to replace its upstream assignment and cover its next year's need. Renumbering then tidied routing and let the upstream recover its old block. Okutani and co-author Terence Zhang Yinghao pointed out the bargain's missing half in their first draft of prop-094. The last /8 gave a new LIR only a single /22. APNIC could still demand the return, but it could no longer make the departing operator whole.

Their January 2011 draft offered a modest escape: retain the renumbering promise or show at least 80% use of the addresses already held from upstream. The percentage put another test between a running network and a scarce block. At the meeting, Randy Bush asked why the condition should survive at all. Mark Newton asked how many applicants faced a larger block to return than the /22 they could receive. Okutani said she had not counted those cases. The arithmetic was enough to force a rewrite, but the record gives no population size.

The chair asked the authors for new text overnight. The next morning Okutani returned with a narrower and cleaner line: prop-094-v002 removed the one-year renumbering criterion for an initial allocation under the final-/8 policy. It did not install the 80% alternative. The Policy SIG found consensus on 24 February 2011; the member meeting ratified the revised text. APNIC records EC endorsement on 6 May and implementation on 9 May.

The word “new” concealed the trap. As Bush clarified in the room, a new LIR could be an old network finally requesting its own APNIC space. It already had customers, routes and an upstream address assignment. A policy written for a generous replacement block treated that operating network as if it could pack two suitcases into one. Okutani's change let it take the smaller independent block without immediately evicting the addresses under its existing service.

The policy record establishes the changed rule and dates. APNIC's applicant files would be needed to count how many LIRs retained upstream space as a result. The institutional choice is visible already: when the registry could no longer replace the address holding it ordered returned, the return order lost its reason.