Summary

  • In 2016, Andrew Alston and four coauthors offered AFRINIC a blunt IPv4 bargain: keep a /13 for new entrants and let the rest of the pool run down under ordinary needs-based rules. AFRINIC-25 found no consensus.
  • Alston's side withdrew its draft after asking both rival groups to start again together. The rival Soft Landing BIS draft went back to the list. A later appeal overturned a consensus call on BIS, while Alston returned to a rules-review role in 2026.

Andrew Alston brought a /13 to a room arguing about an entire continent's remaining IPv4. That is 524,288 addresses on paper, and a rather larger argument in practice: who gets to reserve the future, and who pays while everyone waits for it?

His February 2016 Soft Landing Overhaul proposal, written with Kris Seeburn, Mark Elkins, Michele McCann and John Walubengo, would have stripped back AFRINIC's existing slow-depletion scheme. Ordinary applicants would continue under needs-based allocation until the unreserved pool was exhausted. A /13 would wait for new entrants, each eligible for no more than a /22, processed in arrival order. The draft argued that stretching the life of IPv4 could hold back IPv6 adoption. That was the authors' case, not a measured outcome.

At AFRINIC-25 in Mauritius, Alston, Seeburn and Elkins presented it. Opponents called accelerated depletion a crash landing. They argued that a growing industry still needed IPv4 to make an IPv6 transition work. One speaker also challenged the logic of wanting faster local depletion while another proposal would let IPv4 enter the region. The co-chairs found no consensus and returned Overhaul to the mailing list. The room had heard a precise reserve number; it had not bought the premise.

The rival was not asking the same question with a different label. In the AFRINIC-24 minutes, the June 2016 BIS draft kept the phased landing, cut the phase-one maximum from /10 to /15, required IPv6 space before a request from the last /8, and held a /13 for unforeseen uses. Alston’s /13 was for new entrants. The identical prefix length made for a neat headline; the beneficiaries were different.

Then came the unusual second act, recorded in the same minutes. Authors of the competing Soft Landing BIS draft invited the two groups to find a common problem statement. Alston's group asked that both proposals be withdrawn before the joint attempt. Overhaul's authors withdrew theirs. BIS was returned to the list for further discussion, without a consensus finding or a recorded withdrawal there. The distinction matters: a handshake about collaborating did not erase the two different procedural outcomes.

AFRINIC's proposal archive dates the withdrawal to 29 November 2016. Later, Alston challenged a declared consensus on BIS; AFRINIC-28 minutes record that the appeal committee reversed the co-chairs' decision and that BIS again went back to discussion. The appeal did not enact Alston's /13. It reopened a decision about the other draft.

The long afterlife also has an ending. AFRINIC-29’s minutes record that the BIS authors let their proposal expire on 1 December 2018. Its return to discussion after the appeal had not turned it into policy. A draft withdrawn in 2016 and another allowed to expire two years later: neither side got its preferred landing gear into the rulebook.

The person in the argument has an institutional history. AFRINIC's 2016 annual report lists Alston as a director during 2014–17 and an audit committee member. In March 2026, AFRINIC appointed him to its bylaws review committee. A decade after the /13 fight, he is again in a room about rules. The questions it made awkward remain easy to recognise: which scarcity is being managed, for whom, and by whose decision?