Summary

  • Andrew Alston and coauthors proposed that AFRINIC withhold new number resources for 12 months from governments and majority-state-owned entities after an internet shutdown; three shutdowns in ten years could trigger revocation.
  • AFRINIC's May 2017 policy meeting found no consensus. Participants challenged the registry's ability to judge shutdowns and the harm a resource sanction could inflict on people who did not order one.

The draft had a stopwatch and a hammer. Anyone could report a suspected shutdown to AFRINIC. The community would get two weeks to submit evidence; a governance committee would get another two weeks to evaluate it. Then a government that ordered a total or partial shutdown, and companies more than half owned by the state, would face a 12-month freeze on new number resources after the shutdown ended. Three shutdowns within ten years could mean revocation of their existing resources. Academic and educational institutions had an exemption. These were proposed rules, not powers AFRINIC exercised. The AFRINIC-26 policy minutes record the terms and the debate.

Andrew Alston was one of the proposal's authors, alongside Ben Roberts and Fiona Asonga. His worry was concrete: governments could order a blackout while network operators lost revenue and users lost contact. In an April mailing-list exchange, he argued for a sanction aimed at the state rather than everyone in a country, and discussed exemptions for education and critical services. The ambition made sense. The instrument was the argument. A number registry can record who holds an address; the draft asked it to decide whether a government had crossed a political line and then make addresses the penalty.

The Nairobi meeting on 31 May was blunt. The minutes record objections that the policy-development process was the wrong forum, that AFRINIC lacked the capacity to judge the legitimacy of a shutdown, and that number allocation follows need rather than political conduct. Other participants pressed the authors to reduce harm to citizens and end users. The co-chairs declared no consensus and returned the proposal to the list. AFRINIC separately clarified that the proposal came from community members, not AFRINIC Ltd. Its own name had already been mistaken for an endorsement.

A few days later, AFRINIC joined other African Internet organisations in a joint statement condemning shutdowns while calling this proposed sanction unsustainable. That is the story's sting: people could oppose the blackout and still refuse to turn the address book into a court. The meeting did exactly that.