AFRINIC placed in receivership

Sat Sep 16 17:36:14 UTC 2023

On Sat, Sep 16, 2023 at 6:24 AM Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/international/1813989-the-strange-case-of-africas-stolen-ip-addresses
>

"When African ISPs allocate IP addresses to all those new electronic
devices, they will not be using the legacy IPv4 addresses AFRINIC is
currently risking its existence over. Instead, they will be allocating
<https://theconversation.com/heres-why-the-internet-will-always-have-enough-space-for-all-our-devices-122559>
the
IPv6 addresses that represent the future of the Internet, both inside and
outside Africa."

*whew*

OK, that was a good laugh.
I needed some humour to start my day off.  ;P

Sorry--any article that ignores the non-starting aspect of IPv6-only
connectivity isn't worth the electrons it's (not) printed on.  :/

The sad fact of the Internet today is that without at least *some* IPv4
addresses, you're not on the Internet.
Sure, you can do 464XLAT and other things like that to *minimize* the
amount of IPv4 addresses you need, but you can't run a pure IPv6-only
network today for consumer use; there's too much of the Internet you just
can't access without at least some IPv4 presence.   And as such, that means
that every ISP, every company that wants to be multihomed to more than one
upstream provider requires allocations of *both* IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in
order to be functional.

I think it's an ugly situation all around, but from my reading of the
Consolidated Resource Policy Manual,
what Cloud Innovations did is clearly against the intent stated in the
AFRINIC policy manual:
"5.4.6.2 AFRINIC resources are for AFRINIC service region and any use
outside the region should be solely in support of connectivity back to the
AFRINIC region."

That clause has been in the AFRINIC Consolidated Policy Resource Manual
since version 0.1, published nearly a decade ago in 2014.
https://afrinic.net/cpm-0-1

Now, if I had been involved in crafting the policy document, I would have
strongly recommended that the particular clause be included in section 5.2,
rather than 5.4, as it really should have been broadly applicable no matter
what phase of exhaustion the IPv4 pool happened to be in at the time.  By
tucking it in under 5.4, in the "Soft Landing" portion of the document, it
wrapped the regional requirement under a relatively restrictive scope:
"This IPv4 Soft Landing policy applies to the management of address space
that will be available to AFRINIC after the current IPv4 pool is depleted.
The purpose of this document is to ensure that address space is assigned
and/or allocated in a manner that is acceptable to the AFRINIC community
especially during this time of IPv4 exhaustion."

Had policy 5.4.6.2 instead been policy 5.2.1.5, this would be a moot
discussion, and Cloud Innovations would clearly be in the wrong, and
AFRINIC would be clearly justified in clawing the number resources back.

However, because the regional use restriction was tucked under the rubric
of the "applies to the management of address space that will be available
to AFRINIC *after* the current IPv4 pool is depleted" stipulation (emphasis
mine), it leaves the argument open that until AFRINIC completely exhausted
its available IPv4 pool, no such regional restriction should apply.

I do not envy either party in this fight.

But if nothing else, it can provide guidance on why number policy matters,
and why it is useful to have contrarians that look at every clause and
wonder "could this be abused in a way we hadn't considered?"   ^_^;

Matt
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