An update on the AfriNIC situation

Mon Aug 30 14:19:53 UTC 2021

> On Aug 30, 2021, at 06:30, Rubens Kuhl <rubensk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 3:39 AM Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>>> On Aug 29, 2021, at 12:48 , Jay Hennigan <jay at west.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 8/29/21 11:42, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
>>> 
>>>> It would seem reasonable to leave the whole issue up to the courts,
>>>> instead of engaging in contempt of foreign courts, and to stop the
>>>> vigilante justice against any of the parties, especially the end users
>>>> who are not even a party to this whole dispute.
>>> 
>>> The end users are an indirect party.
>>> 
>>> Assume someone were in the business of stealing cars, forging their titles, and selling them to innocent third parties. A police officer pulling someone over for speeding might compare the VIN on the title to that on the car and discover that it was stolen. The stolen property would be returned to its owner and the end user purchaser would be out of luck other than having recourse against the thief.
>>> 
>>> The same principle applies to someone who innocently accepts counterfeit money.
>> 
>> Sure, but that’s not exactly what happened here. There’s a limit to what I can say, but the already public facts show
>> that:
>> 
>> AFRINIC started this fight by threatening to revoke Cloud Innovations address space.
>> 
>> Cloud Innovation is disputing this revocation on the basis that it has not violated the RSA, CPM, or Bylaws as they are written.
>> 
>> AFRINIC has a history of making up process as they go along and violating their own rules whenever it suits them.
> 
> Are you saying that there was no AFRINIC policy at allocation time
> that prevented usage outside Africa ?

Not only then, but now as well. The only such policy in the CPM is enshrined within the soft landing policy and applies only to registrations made after exhaustion phase 1 started. 

>> AFRINIC has violated court orders and acted in bad faith at virtually every opportunity in this process.
> 
> Nope, see Tom's message right before this one.

The court ordered AFRINIC to reinstate cloud innovation on the 13th. They deliberately delayed until the 15th hoping to win a hearing that morning. They did not get what they wanted, instead being admonished by the judge.

>> As such, I think vigilante action and/or trying this case here on NANOG is probably not the best idea. I realize it’s easy to sympathize with John and he puts forth a good story, but there is more to the story than what John has represented here.
> 
> It's not just John as you have seen by now. And besides the case
> merits, the main issue is CI trying to win by suffocation. And that's
> why carpet bombing those IP blocks might be needed so the next scumbag
> doesn't try the same trick with someone else.

This is neither a fair nor accurate portrayal of the situation. Further, by acting as it had, AFRINIC was the one which tried to suffocate CI first.

You may not like Lu and/or his business model. I’m not a fan of his business model myself, but it is technically permitted under existing policy. If the community doesn’t like that fact, there is a process to change the policies. Terminating a member based on rules which don’t actually exist, on the other hand sets a very dangerous and corrupt precedent and is a threat to the trust we all want to have in the RIR system. 

Owen