The IETF Datatracker has received the first draft of the report from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) workshop on IP Address Geolocation. The workshop at the end of 2025 brought together researchers, protocol and standards experts, operators, and the IP geolocation providers in registry and industry, to discuss the issues.
We may want to believe the question of ‘where an IP address is’ has simple answers. The draft lays out the edge cases and complications that have been encountered trying to answer it, showing that simple models are not sufficient.
The overview document was prepared under the Chatham House rule, meaning that “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed”. The list of references and position papers alone is worth the read to understand the work done before the workshop, and the different inputs to the discussion.
Sections 5.3 and 5.4 identify the ‘next steps’ in building a consensus position on the IP geolocation problem space for the future. But, a note of caution is clearly stated:
It is unlikely that any one new technical solution can address the various use cases that currently passively use IP geolocation. Different technical solutions will be fit for purpose for different use cases, and will not be one-size-fits-all.
Report from the IAB Workshop on IP Address Geolocation, Sections 5.3 and 5.4.
APNIC, along with other Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), publishes delegation reports that include the registered economy of the delegate as an ISO3166 CC. In many instances, this data is the starting point from which more refined views of geolocation are derived.
Users of this data should clearly understand that it is NOT an authoritative, or even required, statement of the location where an IP address is deployed. Rather, the data helps identify where the entity with management control over the IP address is located.
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