Live Wire
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On 4 February 2026 AFRINIC’s Board ratified a transfer policy with a door that opens one way. Addresses from other regions may enter. The addresses AFRINIC issued may not go. The reason is in AFRINIC’s own assessment, in a sentence about revenue: it “will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs”.
Story
For five years “IP for Africa” has been thrown at the networks AFRINIC is supposed to serve. On 13 November Lu Heng answered it in the simplest way available: he agreed with it. The slogan, he writes, is a promise a registry makes to its customers. Those who control AFRINIC have been reading it as a deed made out to themselves.
Creators
His shutdown memory and Sumon Sabir’s APNIC 62 talk turn resilience into a local dependency audit.
Story
AFRINIC has no shareholders. It calls itself a member-based organisation, and the record the Registrar of Companies issued on 28 October 2026 shows who its members are in law: its eight directors, and Cloud Innovation, which the Supreme Court of Mauritius ordered onto the register. The networks that pay AFRINIC’s fees are not on the page.
Member Access
Strategic Circle turns infrastructure moves, policy shifts and market signals into a concise briefing in your chosen language—plus the research library and member forum—for USD 20/month.
Governance
A transit agency can spend weeks building a security proposal around a published score. A port can do the same. The federal referee then has room to use weights and selection factors the applicants were never fully shown. A number on a scorecard is useful only when the rules behind it can survive daylight.
Market / Companies
IndiaAI lists NxtGen. APNIC identifies its network. Neither record tells a customer when a particular GPU will be ready, or who will control the workload running on it.
Market
When BIRD users asked for a standard API, Maria Matejka found three protocol paths—and a bigger job still waiting: joining several Linux components behind one management entrance.
Market / Trends
Ultimate lets qualifying guests participate without consuming a paid seat. The invitation becomes more expensive when the job calls for permissions beyond the exemption. Someone assigning access can change the billable headcount while procurement is still arguing about the price per head.
Governance / NOGS
The conference has a last date for pitches and a much earlier race for the stage. Its own call makes the distinction impossible to miss.
Editorial position
Internet governance is too often described as theory, consensus, or institutional comfort while operators live with the consequences of structure, scarcity, jurisdiction, and incentives.
BTW shows how the system works when assumptions meet reality: clear, direct, evidence-led reporting that keeps the focus on structure rather than spectacle. We turn difficult infrastructure questions into analysis that operators, investors and policy leaders can use.
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Reporting on address stewardship, representation, and the institutions shaping number-resource governance.
Five regional sessions: ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, AFRINIC, and LACNIC.
North America policy and transfer market signals.
Europe governance transparency and accountability monitoring.
Asia Pacific allocation pressure and policy dynamics.
Board legitimacy, election process, and legal continuity.
Institutional adaptation and ICP-2 governance trajectory.
Operational intelligence from the communities where routing, peering, resilience, and deployment practice are tested.
North America NOGs
Asia-Pacific NOGs
Latin America and Caribbean NOGs
History of the Internet
Domain registrars could return new names during a five-day grace period and recover the registration fee. That useful correction window also offered a mass buyer a free option: register names, test which attracted money, return the rest. ICANN first put a small charge on excess returns, then limited the refund itself. Its own reports show a 99.7% fall in grace-period deletions from June 2008 to April 2009. The striking result is a measured change in returns after two different interventions, not a magic property of the final policy alone.
Leadership Alliance
Breizh-IX can rebuild a strict filter every night. Its new RS-API proposal begins where tidy route lists stop: a customer's wish to have an announcement passed on is a separate instruction, and somebody has to keep that instruction attached to the running server.
