On the internet, internet protocol (IP) is the most important resource used to exchange data traffic in the online world. Unfortunately, since the early age of the internet, IP address distribution has been biased. In fact, Africa got only 3% of the IPv4 numbers to serve 14% of the world’s population that lives on the continent. Nowadays, even this scant allocation has been targeted to be utilised outside the region.
AFRINIC (African Network Information Centre) is the regional internet registry (RIR) for Africa. During the AFRINIC Policy Development Working Group (PDWG) session, and after the IPv4 resources became scarce in 2011, some of the AFRINIC members proposed policies allowing these scarce resources to be transferred outside the region, while other policy proposals to audit resource usage according to the members’ agreements were rejected.
Such behaviour has always been supported by anonymous or new registered members of the Resource Policy Development mailing list to make the atmosphere of the PDWG toxic and cripple the Policy Development Process by creating unnecessary conflict and many appeals to the group chair’s decisions. Evidence indicates that suspicious fellowships were permitted to attend PDWG sessions with prepared draft policy documents favouring one opinion.
At the moment, AFRINIC’s existence is at risk. The organisation is legally and financially targeted and there are repeated calls in the AFRINIC community to migrate the registry service to operate from outside the region.
Continue reading at the AfriSIG website.
Image courtesy of Pexels.com and logo courtesy of AFRINIC.