Summary

  • AFRINIC’s official record assigns three acts concerning AFPUB-2021-GEN-002-DRAFT03 to 28 July 2022: consensus was announced, the PDWG chairs sent a ratification report to the Board, and the proposal was withdrawn by its author. The page gives no times of day, so it cannot establish the order among those acts.
  • The then-current Policy Development Process text reproduced on AFRINIC’s proposal page allowed an author or authors to withdraw a draft by notifying the RPD mailing list. Its published sentence stated no express cutoff after rough consensus, Last Call, a later consensus announcement, or transmission of a report to the Board.
  • Consensus made the proposal part of a collective procedural record, but it did not by itself make the proposal an executable rule. Sending a ratification report was a handoff, not ratification. The available record proves neither a Board decision nor implementation.
  • The defensible answer is not to declare that the author, participants, chairs, Board, or registry “owned” the proposal or the Internet resources affected by it. AFRINIC needed a stage-transfer receipt identifying who held procedural custody, when unilateral withdrawal ended, who decided a late withdrawal request, what remained of the consensus record, and whether ratification or implementation ever followed.