Summary

  • Rajesh Chharia's 2008 prop-053 reduced APNIC's minimum IPv4 allocation from /21 to /22. The policy took effect that August; its separate fee component was removed during consensus.
  • Fifteen years later, Chharia and Vivek Narayan's prop-152 sought a future maximum of /24 for new accounts after the available pool emptied. It did not reach consensus at APNIC 56 and was abandoned in February 2024.

In 2008, a small Indian ISP could be forced to buy a coat two sizes too big. APNIC's minimum allocation was /21, or 2,048 IPv4 addresses. Chharia's prop-053 final draft said operators that needed only /22, or 1,024 addresses, still had to take the larger block. The draft illustrated the burden with an annual membership fee of AU$3,169 at the time. Bigger allocation, bigger commitment, and unused addresses in a resource already worth conserving.

The community accepted the smaller floor. The APNIC proposal history records consensus at APNIC 25 in February 2008, with the fee component removed, and implementation on 4 August. The address rule changed; the draft's fee scheme did not. Chharia's point survived because it needed no romance: making a small operator take more than it needs is an expensive way to ration a finite resource.

Fast-forward fifteen years. The first text of prop-152, now coauthored with Vivek Narayan, proposed leaving the prevailing /23 maximum alone until the then-available pool ran out. After that trigger, a new account with no IPv4 could receive at most /24, or 256 addresses, from reserve space once available. Existing holders would get no further IPv4; a waiting list would follow complete exhaustion. The 2023 inventory and projected 2024 depletion in the draft were a dated forecast, not today's warehouse count.

This time the problem was the ceiling, not the floor. In 2008, too large a minimum shut small entrants out. In 2023, the coauthors feared too generous a maximum would leave later entrants outside. Both documents' disadvantages boxes saw no problem. The APNIC Secretariat assessment identified at least one: the waiting list the newer draft proposed already existed in policy. It also advised dropping inventory numbers that could change while the proposal was debated.

At APNIC 56, prop-152 did not reach consensus and returned to the mailing list. The proposal record shows the chairs abandoned it on 29 February 2024. Chharia had tried twice to make a smaller IPv4 slice serve a smaller network. The first cut changed the rule; the second remained an argument about who should still get through the door.