Summary

  • AFRINIC’s operative 2020 Constitution requires the Board to consult both Members and the community, with at least 60 days for comments, before finalising fee changes.
  • Draft Article 4.2(b) names only Members at that pre-decision stage. Draft Article 4.2(c) still gives the community at least 60 days’ notice after finalisation and delays new fees until the next financial year.
  • This is a draft redline, not an adopted rule or evidence of an actual exclusion. A clause-level disposition record would show whether the change is intentional and why.

There is an easy way to miss the change in AFRINIC’s proposed Constitution: count the days. The operative clause offers at least sixty before finalisation. The draft offers at least sixty before finalisation and at least sixty before implementation. On a calendar, the protection can look stronger.

Read the nouns, however, and the allocation of participation changes.

AFRINIC’s published Constitution, effective from December 2020, places fee review in Article 4.2. The Board may review the fees listed in Article 4.1 from time to time. Before finalising a change, Article 4.2(ii) requires it to consult “the Members and the community” and allow at least sixty days for comments. After finalisation, Article 4.2(iii) requires a notification period to Member and community of not less than sixty days.

The draft proposed amended Constitution published in August 2026 reorganises the same sequence. Article 4.2(b) says the Board shall consult the Members before finalising changes and allow at least sixty days for comments. The words “and the community” are not in that clause. In Article 4.2(c), the community returns: finalised fees may take effect only from the next financial year, provided Members, as appropriate, and the community receive at least sixty days’ prior notice.

This is not a story about sixty days being deleted. It is about which audience the Constitution expressly places inside the decision and which audience it places after the decision.

The best case for the draft

The strongest defence is substantial. AFRINIC is a company with formal members. Members carry legal rights and direct payment obligations, and a constitutional fee clause can reasonably make them the mandatory consultation constituency. The draft also improves implementation predictability: notice reaches Members and the wider community, lasts at least sixty days and must precede the next financial year in which the new fee takes effect.

Nor is the draft being developed behind a closed door. The Bylaws Review Committee’s 4 August announcement opened a second consultation to the whole community. It offered a section-by-section view of existing language, proposed language and stated rationale, with a place to comment. The page described further committee revision, external legal review, Board consideration and, if approved, a Special General Members Meeting. An official 25 August message extended the process into a third consultation while the Committee continued to review submissions.

Those facts make claims of deliberate exclusion untenable on the present record. The captured draft is not an adopted Constitution. It is not even the final committee recommendation. There is no fee proposal in the evidence package, no Board approval, no member resolution and no person shown to have been refused a hearing.

But a consultation on the constitutional review is not the same instrument as a constitutional duty to consult in every future fee review. The current process can be inclusive while still producing a clause that allocates future participation differently. That is precisely why a redline deserves a disposition.

Consultation is not notice

The difference is temporal, not ceremonial. Consultation before finalisation supplies evidence while alternatives remain available. The Board remains free to reject every submission, but the named audience has a defined place in the record before the choice closes.

Notice after finalisation performs another valuable job. It gives organisations time to budget, renew contracts, adjust service plans or challenge an implementation through whatever routes remain. The draft’s next-financial-year rule may be an especially useful restraint on abrupt change. None of that makes notice retroactive consultation. A recipient can prepare for a decision without having had a constitutional opportunity to influence it.

A participant on AFRINIC’s RPD list called out this exact distinction on 11 September. The message argued that community notice after a decision is not equivalent to community influence before it. That is a participant’s analysis, not AFRINIC’s rationale, legal advice or consensus. It matters because it makes the textual issue explicit in the public comment record; it does not settle the answer.

The narrower question is better than a motive hunt. Was “and the community” removed from draft Article 4.2(b) deliberately? If so, is the intended model that member consultation supplies the formal decision record while community notice supplies implementation visibility? If not, will the words be restored? Either outcome can be described honestly. Silence leaves future readers to guess.

Give the clause a receipt

The appropriate control is not another general promise of transparency. It is a clause-level redline and disposition record for Article 4.2.

That record should place the operative wording beside each draft version. It should identify the exact change to the pre-decision audience and state whether the Committee recommends retaining, replacing or deleting it. It should summarise the material comments considered and explain the reason for the chosen language. Later entries should record the recommendation authority, the Board’s action, the Special General Members Meeting resolution and the final adopted text. Version, date, correction and supersession links would preserve the chain.

The receipt need not publish privileged legal advice, private submissions or personal identities. Comments can be aggregated or anonymised. The useful fact is institutional: this phrase changed; the responsible body considered the change; this was its disposition; these were the subsequent approvals.

AFRINIC’s official 25 August message says an external legal opinion concerning dispute resolution and resource-member termination is confidential. Nothing captured says that opinion addressed Article 4.2. Dragging it into the fee-clause question would confuse separate debates and demand evidence that does not exist. A clean disposition record can answer the drafting question without trespassing on privileged material.

This matters because fees are not ordinary product prices. They fund the registry through compulsory or near-compulsory relationships attached to access to number-resource services. The Board needs room to govern finances. Members need predictable obligations. The operational community can also hold evidence about effects that formal company categories do not reveal. The clause decides when that wider evidence has a guaranteed route into the process.

The draft may ultimately draw the line at Members. It may restore the community. It may define a different consultation mechanism elsewhere. Good governance does not require pretending those choices are identical. It requires leaving a record clear enough that the adopted words can be understood as a decision rather than an accident.

Sources