APNIC

Each APNIC Executive Council (EC) member serves as an individual, not as a representative of any other party or Member. Therefore, they must act at all times in the best interests of APNIC. The APNIC EC meets face-to-face at four regularly scheduled meetings per year.

The APNIC Secretariat operates to serve its Members and the Asia Pacific Internet community stakeholders.

Its activities are designed to help the APNIC community achieve APNIC's objectives. The Secretariat (APNIC's staff) carries out the day-to-day work. The Secretariat is structured in five divisions: Services, Technical, Business, Communications, and Learning & Development. These divisions encompass all APNIC activities, including that of acting as a central source of information for Members.

APNIC delegates IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) and (ASNs) according to policies developed by the APNIC community. All IP and AS number delegation is subject to certain criteria, based on demonstrated need.

The APNIC Whois Database details of IP addresses and AS numbers originally allocated by APNIC. It shows the organizations that hold the resources, where the allocations were made, and contact details for the networks. Users can search the whois for information pertaining to these resources, for network troubleshooting, or helping to track network abuse. The organizations that hold those resources are responsible for updating their information in the database. Internet number resources must be properly and accurately registered to fulfil the goals of addressing policy as outlined by the Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), who are responsible for the operation of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions.

This accurate registration of resource usage is a critical role APNIC plays in the operation of the Internet.

The database can be searched by using the web interface on the APNIC site,[5] or by directing your whois client to whois.apnic.net (for example, whois -h whois.apnic.net 203.37.255.97).

APNIC provides an alternative to the whois called the Registration Data Access protocol (RDAP), which was designed to address issues in the whois service, the most important of which are: standardization of queries and responses; internalization considerations to cater for languages other than English in data objects; and redirection capabilities to allow seamless referrals to other registrations.

For network abuse such as spam or (hacking), people mistakenly interpret references to apnic.net when doing a whois search to indicate that APNIC is the source of the abuse. Instead, these references to APNIC simply mean that the address space in question was delegated by APNIC to an organization within the Asia Pacific region. APNIC has no authority to prevent these kinds of network abuse.

APNIC also has no technical ability to 'suspend' an Internet service, no mandate to withdraw address registrations, no investigative powers, nor any authority to take action as an enforcement agency. APNIC is in the same position as any other IP address or DNS registry worldwide.

APNIC manages reverse DNS delegations for both IPv4 and IPv6. APNIC only delegates the authority of reverse zones to the DNS name servers provided through domain objects.

APNIC provides a Resource Certification service, which is a robust security framework used to verify the association between specific IP address blocks of ASNs and the holders of those Internet number resources. APNIC introduced Resource Certification to improve inter-domain security in the region and enhance the value of the data in the APNIC Whois Database with verification of the resource holder's right-of-use.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the validation structure for Resource Certification that enables public network users to verify the authenticity of data that has been digitally signed by the data originator.

APNIC conducts a number of training courses[6] in a wide variety of locations around the region. These courses are designed to educate participants to proficiently configure, manage and administer their Internet services and infrastructure and to embrace current best practices.

APNIC holds two conferences a year in various locations around the Asia Pacific region. The first one is held with the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) and the second one is a stand-alone conference. Both events have a series of workshop sessions on topics such as routing, IPv6, and network security, and plenary and conference tracks on operational topics of current interest.

APNIC Labs provide research, measurement, and technical reports on the use of Internet number resources within the Internet, for example, IPv6 deployment.

Major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), National Internet Registries (NIRs) and Network Information Centres (NICs).

ARIN (North America), LACNIC (Latin America and the Caribbean), RIPE NCC (Europe), and AFRINIC (Africa).

With the other RIRs, APNIC is a member of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), which exists to protect the unallocated number resource pool, to promote and protect the bottom-up policy development process, and to be the focal point for input into the RIR system.

These include the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Engineering and Planning Group (IEPG), the Internet Society (ISOC), and others.

The previous registry for Australia, known as AUNIC, is now disbanded, and its responsibilities undertaken by APNIC.