AFRINIC · RIR Watchdog
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BTW reporting and context linked to this RIR. For the proposal-by-proposal history, the people involved and their changing positions, start with Policy.
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When ‘No Consensus’ Must Give Reasons: The 2020 RPKI AS0 Draft 2 Appeal
In 2020, a proposal for a machine-readable routing-security signal was halted by a distinctly human judgement: AFRINIC’s co-chairs assessed that its second draft lacked consensus. The ensuing appeal put the negative decision itself under scrutiny. Its enduring significance lies…
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The dashboard that could reveal a difference but could not create a punishment
A proposed MyAFRINIC screen promised to put payment records, documents, contact history, routing-adjacent signals and transfer questions in one private view. That convenience could have made registry records easier to correct. It also risked making fundamentally different kinds…
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The Fee at the Prefix Boundary: What Resolution 202001.546 Actually Authorised
In January 2020, AFRINIC's Board drew new Mini and Micro membership-fee lines around IPv4 prefix bands. The lines were easy to state, but the surviving evidence does not show the economic bridge from a member's recorded prefix to the charge it was expected to bear. That…
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Before the Ledger Moves: What AFRINIC Resolution 202002.550 Required
AFRINIC’s February 2020 disclosure matters less as a scandal notice than as a test of sequence: when an internal record appears wrong, the registry must preserve the evidence, refer suspected wrongdoing to competent investigators, keep its live register accurate and repair the…
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The Six-Month Return Clock: Draft 8 and the Limit of AFRINIC’s RSA Power
For an operator, six months is not an abstract grace period. It can be the interval between an adverse registry finding and the forced unwinding of part of a live address portfolio: customer migrations, reverse-DNS changes, routing-security dependencies, transfer choices, legal…
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AFRINIC's current Board is making decisions, but its resolutions archive still stops at 2022
AFRINIC says its Board publishes resolutions and the minutes of the meetings where they were taken. As of 13 August 2026, the page making that promise listed years only through 2022—even though the purported current Board has since announced decisions on management, committees…
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The Penalty Draft 4 Left Undefined
AFRINIC’s fourth abuse-contact proposal looked softer because it erased an elaborate failure ladder and its express route toward revocation procedures. Yet the shorter text preserved the power that mattered most: discretion to warn a resource holder and block unspecified services…
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Two Clauses, One Broken Bridge
AFRINIC’s third draft of its Resource Transfer Policy changed only two provisions: section 5.7.3.2 imposed a twelve-month post-transfer restriction on a source seeking more AFRINIC IPv4 space, and section 5.7.4.3 preserved the legacy status of transferred legacy resources.…
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Eighteen Days to Redraw a Boundary: What AFRINIC’s Draft 5 Left Unsettled
AFRINIC’s official details and current proposal list place eighteen days between Draft 4 and Draft 5 of its abuse-contact proposal, then only twelve days between Draft 5 and the AFRINIC-31 discussion. That narrow interval matters because the new draft made a genuine concession…
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Four Weeks to Show the Work: Evidence Before AFRINIC Consensus
At AFRINIC-31, a proposal about impact analysis exposed a harder question than whether staff could meet a deadline. It asked whether people should have a timely, shared account of technical, operational, financial and legal effects before they were asked to accept a rule—and what…
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The Zero That Had to Move First: AFRINIC’s First AS0 Draft and the Design of Reversible Warning
On 4 November 2019, AFRINIC published its first proposal to originate AS0 ROAs for address space recorded as unallocated. The idea offered operators a useful authenticated warning: ordinary public routing should not emerge from space that the registry ledger said nobody had been…
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The Electorate Behind the Chair: What AFRINIC’s 2019 Draft Could—and Could Not—Authorise
In November 2019, a proposal to formalise elections for the chairs of AFRINIC’s Policy Development Working Group offered a six-month mailing-list electorate, electronic voting and a full procedural calendar. It also placed candidate screening, objections, ratification, vacancy…
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A Contact Test Is Not an Abuse Trial: AFRINIC Draft 3 and the Boundary It Exposed
When AFRINIC published the third draft of its Abuse Contact Policy Update in June 2019, it made a distinction with consequences far beyond mailbox administration: proving that an operator can be reached is not the same thing as deciding whether that operator handled an abuse…
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Draft 7 offered six months, but did not clearly offer a cure
On 6 April 2019, AFRINIC published Version 7.0 of its Internet Number Resources Review proposal, AFPUB-2016-GEN-001-DRAFT07. Its one stated change from Draft 6 sounded protective: an organisation would have at least six months, and perhaps longer, before resources were recovered.…
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The ledger behind the call: what AFRINIC needed to show for Resource Transfer Policy Draft 4
On 5 October 2020, a fourth version of AFRINIC’s Resource Transfer Policy became the text that mattered. The public meeting in September had discussed the policy project, but it could not have approved words that had not yet been submitted. Once AFPUB-2019-V4-003-DRAFT04 arrived…
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The Longer Clock and the Shorter Fuse: AFRINIC’s Draft 2 Abuse-Contact Paradox
AFRINIC’s second abuse-contact draft relaxed the timetable for proving that a mailbox worked, yet sharpened what could happen when the proof failed. The proposal’s real significance lies in that mismatch: a modest record-accuracy test was redesigned as a possible gateway to loss…
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Four Repairs, Four Gates: The Private Authority Map Inside AFRINIC’s PDP Bis Draft 4
On 29 October 2018, AFRINIC published a proposed rulebook in which PDWG chairs would have up to two weeks to pronounce on consensus, yet their decision still sat inside a longer chain: a Board-appointed committee could review process, the Board could remand a proposal on…
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The Million-Address Switch: What SL-Update Draft 1 Actually Changed
On 28 October 2018, three authors published a proposal that would rewrite a single paragraph in AFRINIC’s Soft Landing policy. The change was compact, but the reserve behind it was not: an unused /12, containing 1,048,576 IPv4 addresses. SL-Update Draft 1 proposed taking the…
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The record outside the contract: AFRINIC’s first legacy-transfer draft
AFRINIC said it maintained inherited Internet number records for organisations with which it had no ordinary contract. That arrangement could persist while an address block stayed put. A proposed transfer made the anomaly urgent: the registry needed reliable evidence of who could…
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A routing identity without a second upstream: how Draft 1 challenged AFRINIC’s multihoming proxy
A routing identity without a second upstream: how Draft 1 challenged AFRINIC’s multihoming proxy intelligence summary explains the development, the public evidence available to readers, the organisations involved, the regional context, market exposure, and the infrastructure…