Summary

  • AFRINIC proposal AFPUB-2026-GEN-002-DRAFT01 would create periodic compliance checks automated as far as possible, member notices and escalation states in a member dashboard.
  • AFRINIC's impact assessment supports the value of visibility but warns that undefined enforcement, weak due process and qualitative judgements cannot safely be collapsed into machine-generated status labels.

A dashboard is useful precisely because it compresses complexity. That is also its danger. A member who sees a red cell next to an abuse contact, route object or reverse-DNS requirement needs to know whether the cell reports a failed technical test, a disputed interpretation or a formal finding. Those are not interchangeable states.

BTW publication note: Published is the scheduled editorial date, 2026-09-06. The actual server publication time remains unset until publish-now succeeds.

The proposal was submitted on 30 April 2026, and revision 1 was posted to AFRINIC's Resource Policy Discussion list on 26 May. It is still under discussion. AFRINIC-37 included it on the Public Policy Meeting agenda on 24 June 2026. It would add a new section to the Consolidated Policy Manual and place a compliance view in MyAFRINIC or a future member communications platform. The design envisages periodic review, as much automation as possible, notifications when non-compliance is detected, reminders and staff escalation when non-compliance persists.

It also points toward procedures for service withholding, resource revocation or member closure under existing contractual authority.

The 23 June impact assessment makes the operational attraction concrete. Automated checks could test WHOIS contact accuracy, abuse-c validity, route-object consistency, relevant RPKI ROA coverage and reverse DNS. Each finding could move through states such as notice sent, remediation in progress, escalated and closed, with timestamped transitions. That would give members a clearer view of defects that today may be discovered late or handled through scattered correspondence.

But a technical observation is not automatically a compliance judgement. A malformed contact record may be objectively detectable. Whether resource use is properly justified, documentation is sufficient or an operational exception is reasonable can require context and professional judgement. AFRINIC's assessment explicitly warns against presenting every policy obligation as a metric that a machine can finally decide.

The same distinction matters for authority. The proposal refers to the Registration Services Agreement, staff-defined procedures and Board exceptions for strategic infrastructure or extraordinary conditions. The legal assessment says the dashboard itself is not the strongest concern. The concern is using community policy to create enforcement mechanisms that may belong to contractual and operational governance, while leaving terms such as persistent non-compliance, special measures and essential strategic infrastructure undefined. It separately identifies privacy and data-governance gaps in the proposed design.

That gap can be closed without abandoning the dashboard. Every finding should carry an evidence record: the exact policy and version tested; the observed data and observation time; the test method and its known limits; whether the result is machine-produced or human-determined; the reviewer responsible; the member's response; corrections; and the current appeal state. A status should not contribute to withholding, revocation or closure until the member can inspect and contest that record.

This is an evidence-and-appeal ledger, not another score. It would preserve the dashboard's early-warning value while preventing a convenient interface from silently becoming the source of legal authority. The proposal has not been adopted, and no operating dashboard or sanction is established by the frozen record. The design question is therefore still open at the point where it matters most.