Summary

  • M. Andri Setiawan and David Aditya Yoga Pratama proposed attaching an IPv6 delegation automatically to every new or initial IPv4 delegation at APNIC and its National Internet Registries, with a two-year deployment clock.
  • The draft asked holders seeking more IPv4 space to demonstrate IPv6 deployment. APNIC’s impact assessment found the consequence of missing the deadline unclear. The proposal failed to reach consensus at APNIC 57 and was abandoned in September 2024.

The neatest way to make someone take a second item is to put it in the same bag as the first. M. Andri Setiawan and David Aditya Yoga Pratama tried that logic on Internet addresses. Their January 2024 proposal would have handed an IPv6 allocation or assignment to every new applicant receiving IPv4 from APNIC or a National Internet Registry. The extra space came with a clock: put it into deployment within two years.

That sounds like a small change at the counter. It reaches much further. Today an applicant can obtain IPv4 while leaving IPv6 for another day; APNIC’s own impact assessment noted that a multi-resource application and one-click IPv6 delegation already existed. The proposal would have replaced a choice with an automatic pair. A later IPv4 request would then become a checkpoint: show the deployment status of the IPv6 block, with public routing data among the sources a registry could examine.

The clock had a loud tick and an unfinished alarm. APNIC asked what would happen if the two years expired without deployment. Would the holder lose the IPv6 block, its IPv4 companion, or face another consequence? The proposal supplied no settled answer. That gap matters because the obligation and the sanction sit on opposite sides of a member’s planning decision. If the IPv4 block were at risk, the automatic gift would carry a very different price from an unused IPv6 allocation quietly sitting in a registry account.

Money made the bag heavier too. APNIC’s assessment said a member receiving a /23 IPv4 block together with a /32 IPv6 block could move to a higher fee tier. The authors’ intent was quicker IPv6 adoption, but an automatic resource with an invoice and an uncertain deadline is a policy instrument, not a free sticker on an envelope. The draft even described a change to APNIC’s allocation system so applicants would no longer select IPv4, IPv6, or both separately.

At APNIC 57 on 29 February 2024, the community did not reach consensus. The chairs abandoned prop-158 on 6 September without taking it to APNIC 58. Setiawan’s proposal therefore remains a revealing design exercise rather than an operating rule. It put the real question on the desk: can a registry accelerate actual IPv6 use by bundling an address block with IPv4 when the bill, the proof and the penalty are still being argued over?