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• + Preface
• + Chapter1 Resource Management and Registry
  • Difference between management of IP addresses and domain names
  • Operation of IP address registry
  • Value of domain name as character string
  • Operation of domain name registry
  • Role of registry
• + Chapter2 Resource management before JNIC and JPNIC
  • How domain name management started
  • Start of IP address management
  • From JNIC to JPNIC
  • Column: Network groups involved in establishment of JNIC/JPNIC
• + Chapter3 Restructuring toward fully-fledged resource management by JPNIC
  • Center of the Internet community
  • Dispatching information as a Network Information Center
  • Column: Logo of JPNIC
  • Consideration to fee and membership structure of JPNIC
  • Relocation of the office along with the expansion of service
  • Incorporation of JPNIC
• + Chapter4 Transition of resource management policy for domain names
  • Coping with expansion of the Internet through policy development
  • Deployment of Geographic Type JP and its reconstruction into Prefecture Type JP
  • Introduction of ED.JP for elementary and secondary education institutions
  • Separation of NE.JP and GR.JP from OR.JP
  • Establishment of JP domain name registration rule
• + Chapter5 IP address policy in the fully-fledged Internet age
  • IP address management before the commercial Internet
  • Column: Routing
  • Two concerns regarding the commercial Internet
  • IPv6 as next-generation Internet protocol
  • Coming of CIDR age
  • Column: IP address notation based on CIDR
  • Economical use of IPv4 addresses with classless technology
• + Chapter6 Building the global IP address management structure
  • Departure from overconcentration at The NIC
  • APNIC Pilot Project
  • Establishment of three RIR framework
  • RIR-NIR-LIR framework
  • Column: Assignment Window
  • Transition of IP address policy development framework
  • Effort to establish global framework
• + Chapter7 Framework for global domain name management led by ICANN
  • Finding a domain name management framework for new era
  • Column: Green Paper and White Paper
  • Decision-making process and organizational structure adopted in ICANN
  • Involvement from Japan
  • ICANN's gTLD policy reforms
  • Column: Registry-registrar model and JP Registrar model ? “thick” registry and “thin” registry
  • New gTLDs
  • Relationship between IP address and ICANN
  • Epicenter of Internet governance
• + Chapter8 General-use JP Domain Name and establishment of JPRS
  • Limitations imposed by the organization’s form as an incorporated association
  • JP-DRP
  • General-use JP Domain Name
  • Establishment of JPRS
  • Starting General-Use JP Domain Name Service
  • Towards transfer of management and administration of JP domain name
• + Chapter9 “Publication” and “disclosure” of registration information
  • Registry mechanism to register and publish registration data
  • Spread of the Internet and registration information
  • Discussion on the handling of registration information
  • Organization/group information
  • Responding to Personal Information Protection Act
  • Reference: Documents on handling registration information
• + Chapter10 IPv4 address pool exhaustion and IPv6
  • IPv6 emerging on the Internet
  • Efforts of Japan towards IPv6 promotion
  • Expansion of the Internet through IPv4
  • Accelerated IPv4 address consumption through penetration of continuous connections
  • IPv4 address pool exhaustion becomes more of a reality
  • IPv4 address pool exhaustion and IPv6 educational activity
  • IPv4 address policy in the face of exhaustion
  • Internet over IPv6 after IPv4 exhaustion
• + Appendix1: IP address and domain name
• + Appendix2: Transition of Internet resource management
• + About History Compilation Team
• + Revision history

In addition to the reform of IP address management policy described in Chapter 5, responding to the explosive expansion of the Internet into the 1990s also required establishment of a structure for smooth IP address distribution to Internet users throughout the world. Accordingly, relevant parties all over the world, including JPNIC, endeavored to improve the IP address management framework. Ultimately, operations were distributed on a global scale by dividing the service areas among RIRs and delegating IP address management authority to ISPs. Supporting that framework, the current policy development process has been structured to enable all relevant parties, including users and providers, to participate directly while still maintaining global consistency.

Departure from overconcentration at The NIC

As described in Chapter 2, IP addresses were originally managed uniformly by Jon Postel and The NIC in the 1980s. But then, towards the end of the decade, Daniel Karrenberg of Europe and Jun Murai of Japan lead a far-sighted experiment of bulk assignments. The bulk assignment to Japan was carried out by the Network Address Coordination Committee, and it was taken over by what was then JNIC in 1992. Thus the operational structure, management rules and membership system were streamlined together with JP domain names. This movement became the first step towards a big movement in IP address management, shifting from centralized management by the NIC/IANA to decentralized management by multiple organizations.

Globally, on the other hand, the IAB released RFC 1174^[119] entitled “IAB Recommended Policy on Distributing Internet Identifier Assignment and IAB Recommended Policy Changes for the Internet ‘Connected’ Status” in 1990, when many commercial Internet connectivity providers were entering the market in the U.S. In the RFC, the IAB proposed to consider the central NIC as the main registry for IP addresses and AS numbers, allocate IP address and AS number blocks to the “organizations approved by CCIRN (Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking)”^[120] and “delegate to them further assignment authority” (RFC 1174 1.3).

APNIC Pilot Project

In response to this, consideration of establishing a NIC in the Asia Pacific region started gradually at APCCIRN (Asia Pacific Coordinating Committee for Inter-continental Research Networking)^[121] from around 1992. At that time JNIC was distributing IP addresses for Japanese networks. Through its experience, JNIC was of the opinion that the same delay of the assignment at the NIC as was experienced in Japan might occur throughout Asia, due to language barriers and excess applications from specific areas. From this viewpoint, Murai, the director of JPNIC, and Masaki Hirabaru, the chair of the JPNIC Steering Committee, made a proposal entitled “A Proposal for APNIC experiments”^[122] to APCCIRN in January 1993, which led to the full scale deliberation of establishing APNIC^[123].

That proposal was then fleshed out through further consultations, before being submitted to the APCCIRN meeting held in August 1993 as “Asia Pacific Network Information Center Pilot Project Proposal”. The proposal was approved, and with that APNIC started its service in the form of a pilot project on September 1, 1993^[124].

In APNIC, participants from Australia, South Korea and Thailand, as well as from Japan, worked together and shared the workload^[125]. Among others, it was JPNIC which took a leadership role in promoting the pilot project by offering 10% of its budget for APNIC's operations^[126][127] and providing the University of Tokyo Computer Centre, used as the JPNIC office then, as the operating base of APNIC.

Several people from JPNIC including Hirabaru and Masaya Nakayama were involved in this pilot project. David R. Conrad, who was working for the Internet Initiative Japan Inc. (IIJ) at that time, also joined them to promote the project as a primary figure. Conrad served as the first Director General of APNIC, worked full time to operate APNIC and expanded the service structure until he handed the role over to Paul Wilson in 1998.

Establishment of three RIR framework

In Europe, Karrenberg and other relevant players established RIPE NCC^[128], which started IP address management before APNIC^[129]. The NIC – which had been the central NIC – was transferred from the Defense Department to NSF, and changed its name to InterNIC in 1993^[130]. APNIC was founded soon after, resulting in a three RIR framework to carry out IP addresses management throughout the world as follows:

• InterNIC: North and South America and sub-Saharan Africa
• RIPE NCC: Europe and North Africa (north of the Sahara)
• APNIC: Asia Pacific

Later, LACNIC (The Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry)^[131] for Latin American and the Caribbean region started business in 2002, and AFRINIC (African Network Information Centre)^[132] for the African region was launched in 2005. The five RIR framework has continued to the present day.

RIR-NIR-LIR framework

As described above, IP address management has evolved from centralized management by the NIC into decentralized management by the RIRs. Further, as shown in the previous chapter, it became a norm for IP addresses to be distributed according to CIDR technology^[133] as opposed to a simple first-come, first-served scheme. Through CIDR, the addresses were allocated to ISPs in blocks, and the ISPs assigned addresses from those blocks to their end users. Moreover, in the Asia Pacific region, the NICs of each country, including JPNIC, were deeply committed to establishing APNIC and undertook a prominent role in reducing the linguistic and cultural barriers^[134]. This created a framework unique to the region, which also needed to be maintained. As a result, a hierarchical structure comprising global, regional, national and ISP levels was incorporated in IP address management practices.

At the same time, in the globally expanding Internet, it was clear that the IPv4 address pool was indeed in danger of exhaustion, making it necessary for all the different management organizations to share an appropriate distribution procedure which placed a priority on address conservation.

When RIRs began allocating address blocks to ISPs, the ISPs became referred to as Local Internet Registries (LIRs)^[135]. An LIR is equivalent to an IP Address Management Agent of JPNIC. Designating ISPs as registries helped to clarify the responsibility that ISPs bear for IP address management. Responsibility here means conforming to IP address policies that embrace the five principles of uniqueness, registration, aggregation, conservation and fairness (refer to Chapter1). With regard to “conservation” – which is particularly important for IPv4 – the “assignment window” system (which will be described later) was implemented to coordinate the screening criteria applied when determining the size of assignment and effectively responding to the demand for addresses.

As ISPs became known as LIRs, so too the NICs of several countries handling IP addresses in the APNIC region started to be called National Internet Registries (NIRs). NIRs are the organizations taking charge of address management at the country or economy level, and JPNIC is one of the seven NIRs now in place in the Asia Pacific region (as of 2015)^[136]. At first, APNIC positioned national NICs as confederations of ISPs and distributed IP addresses to them. However, a variety of administrative concerns led to the suspension of the confederation membership category. As a result of discussions initiated in 2000, APNIC released formal NIR Criteria^[137] and NIR Operational Policies^[138] in 2002, to clarify the authority and function of NIRs. More recently, in 2012, the relationship between APNIC and NIRs was also defined contractually in “APNIC and NIR Member Relationship Agreement^[139]”.

The combined result of these developments is the hierarchical structure for address management in the Asia Pacific region, which consists of RIRs, NIRs and LIRs.

Transition of IP address policy development framework

In JPNIC, various rules and systems regarding IP address management have been developed and instituted in at the IP Address Working Group (IP-WG), which was formed by experts as members when JPNIC started IP address management.

Connectivity services offered by commercial Internet service providers started gradually in Japan in the beginning of the 1990s. The state of network construction has continued to change, and new issues have arisen in terms of securing IP addresses. Therefore, the IP-WG has always addressed policy issues in the context of providers' network construction, while simultaneously observing the principle of IP address conservation.

When RFC 2050, which defined IP address management rules, was being developed at the IETF in 1996, strong priority was given to address conservation. The IP-WG was concerned about this direction and thought that it was necessary to notify relevant parties in Japan, promote discussions, and ensure that the Japanese perspective was reflected in the IETF considerations. As a result, the IP-USERS mailing list was formed in 1996, and the IP-USERS offline meeting also started to be held at the same time^[141]. In IP-USERS, not only RFC 2050-related matters but also various other issues regarding IP address management were discussed, which formed the foundation for the open and bottom-up policy development framework that is still applied.

Effort to establish global framework

Up to then, the IP address policies of JPNIC and APNIC were relatively independent. However, when the NIR framework was established at APNIC, it became necessary to maintain consistency in address policies between APNIC and JPNIC. So JPNIC reviewed IP address policy in IP-WG in 1999 and implemented a new IP address policy that was basically the same as that of APNIC in 2000.

At the APNIC meeting held in March 2000, the first Address Policy Special Interest Group (SIG) (the meetings to discuss IP address policies) was held^[142]. Previously, policies such as that of address distribution were discussed as a part of the discussion at the APNIC Annual Member Meetings. But discussion of address distribution policies became an independent session around this time, and it also became clear that address policies would be implemented based on the consensus of the SIG. Takashi Arano, the then chair of JPNIC IP-WG, was appointed as the first chair of the Address Policy SIG. Following that, JPNIC executives and staff started to make proposals and participate proactively in the discussions of APNIC.

At this time the IP-USERS mailing list already existed in JPNIC, and offline meetings were held on a regular basis. As the framework of the Address Policy SIG was established in APNIC, the title of the IP-USERS meeting was changed to the JPNIC Open Policy Meeting (JPOPM)^[143] in 2001. In JPOPM, emphasis was given to affinity with the processes of APNIC. Further, the Policy Working Group^[144] formed by both JPNIC and volunteers started within JPOPM in 2004, to enhance the independence of the policy forum. At the same time, the policy development process^[145] was explicitly documented, and then the present framework was established whereby the Policy WG recommended address policies to JPNIC based on the consensus of JPOPM.

After the three RIR framework was established, the RIRs took a leading role in the actual operations and policy development related to the distribution of IP addresses. IANA used to manage the pool of the entire IP address space, assign /8 IPv4 blocks^[146] to RIRs, and manage the ledger and reverse DNS. However, with the founding of ICANN in 1998, IANA’s structure of policy development regarding IP address management was also streamlined.

In ICANN, Supporting Organizations (SOs) are set according to the type of Internet resources, and these SOs make recommendations to the board regarding respective resources. For IP addresses, the Address Supporting Organization (ASO)^[147] was established with a mandate to review and develop recommendations for IANA service policy regarding distribution of IP addresses and AS numbers. RIRs call the service policy the global policy. The global policy is developed not in ICANN meetings, but in the forums of each RIR. When a consensus is reached at all the RIR forums, it is coordinated by the Address Council (AC) of ASO and recommended to the ICANN Board. The AC was set up in 1999, and Takashi Arano, who was then chair of the IP-WG, served as the AC member from Japan^[148].

In this manner, the registry framework has been improved along with the development of the Internet. The IP address management framework － including IANA, RIRs, LIRs, and the structure to build consensus regarding address policy － has also been streamlined. This present scheme, which takes account of the unique needs of each region while maintaining global consistency, is well established. JPNIC has continuously worked on improving the framework and has proactively engaged itself in the activities of the APNIC Executive Council and the ICANN ASO AC since their foundation, by sending its executives, staff and committee members.