Philip Smith's withdrawn two-year IPv4 reapplication ban

Summary

Philip Smith's prop-072-v001, submitted on 10 March 2009, proposed a two-year bar on new APNIC IPv4 allocations or assignments for organizations that had transferred space under the proposed prop-050 transfer policy.
APNIC records prop-072 as withdrawn on 1 June 2009. In his withdrawal email, Smith said the parent proposal had returned to the Policy SIG, so he was withdrawing two companion fixes. Prop-050 was revised and implemented in 2010; the 24-month bar was not.

The transaction Smith worried about had two trips through the same door. First, an organization transfers IPv4 space to someone else. Then it returns to APNIC with a justified request for addresses from the free pool. The transfer is recorded; the new request can satisfy the ordinary allocation test; the pool nevertheless loses another block. Smith wanted a calendar in the doorway: after a transfer, the applicant waits 24 months before receiving another APNIC IPv4 assignment or allocation.

He wrote the proposal on 10 March 2009 as a supplement to prop-050, the long-running plan to permit IPv4 transfers between APNIC account holders. The March text says the version then under discussion had no limit on a transferor returning for more IPv4. It calls the potential sequence a threat to the remaining pool during runout. It supplies no named transferor, frequency count or measured depletion. The loophole was a design possibility, not a documented case series.

The remedy was blunt. It applied to organizations disposing of space through prop-050, including APNIC members and members of national Internet registries. The draft did not distinguish a transfer of genuinely idle addresses from a deliberate transfer-and-reapply cycle. Its disadvantages section answered with one word: “None.” That is a strikingly cheap price tag for a rule that would have turned a recorded transfer into two years of ineligibility for a different transaction.

The calendar outside Smith's proposal moved faster than the one inside it. APNIC's prop-050 history shows modified transfer terms finding consensus at APNIC 27 in February 2009. On 21 May, the Executive Council returned that proposal to the Policy SIG for further discussion. Smith's 1 June message explains why he withdrew prop-071 and prop-072: both were meant to repair perceived deficiencies in the earlier version of prop-050. Reopening the parent text made the separate repairs dispensable.

Prop-050 went on to a fifth version, August consensus and implementation on 10 February 2010. Prop-072 stayed withdrawn. That difference matters. APNIC adopted a transfer mechanism; it did not adopt Smith's two-year punishment for the transferor. The episode shows how a registry can move from recording a change of holder to judging whether the former holder deserves access to future supply. Smith put that extra power on the table. Once the main transfer bargain reopened, he took it off.