An update on the AfriNIC situation

Fri Aug 27 22:48:35 UTC 2021

On Sat, Aug 28, 2021 at 12:13 AM Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:

> Well, I hope not _many_ other parties.  I guess we’re not talking about “a
> completely different case” after all, then?  Bear in mind that this guy is
> in _no way_ part of the Internet ecosystem.  He is _solely_ extracting rent
> by renting something he stole from us, back to us.  If you’re saying,
> “Well, is that really so bad? This guy steals my car, but at least he’s
> willing to rent it back to me… doesn’t that happen all the time?”  No, not
> so much.
>

That is completely legal and within the rules in the RIPE region now. Yes I
know not AfriNIC but just to point out it is not just one guy but a whole
region doing business like that. We even have an official registry of
companies that buy and sell IP address space.

And by many parties I mean _most_ parties that were part of the system just
before we ran out of IP addresses. Everyone knew it was the last chance so
you had to be an idiot not to get as much address space as possible. Here
in my country the largest ISP got an assignment so big, that they can use 2
IPs for every person living in the country. They do not have a market share
that large, but I suppose they could make up a business plan to lay out
plans for that. And now they can either offer IPv4 services that smaller
and younger ISPs can not or they can sell/rent the space and profit in
exactly the same way as our hypothetical friend here.

In the RIPE region we had a run with many parties that created fake LIRs to
get an extra /22 assignment. Did they steal that any less than this guy?

I believe all of that stinks. It is just that this guy is a small fish
compared to the robbery done by so many others.

Regards,

Baldur
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20210828/18c58062/attachment.html>