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RIR Watchdog
RIR Watchdog governance intelligence tracks institutions, policy processes, standards activity, registry operations, accountability disputes, and implementation signals that affect internet infrastructure. BTW.
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Institution legitimacy and policy execution quality.
Decision-critical policy and control changes.
Primary-source reporting plus structural interpretation.
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Latest from RIR Watchdog
2,440 articles
Story
The Policy Compliance Dashboard appeal tested reviewability of a non-consensus assessment
The Policy Compliance Dashboard looked like an administrative instrument, but its classifications sat upstream of notices and potentially serious registry actions. When the co-chairs concluded that significant objections remained, the ensuing appeal posed a more important…
Story
The date that made the appeal: Draft 4 and the limits of internal review
On 7 October 2020, after a last call begun on 21 September and amid disagreement over whether changes in Draft 4 had received enough final review, the co-chairs said consensus was maintained. The two appeal records that followed did not ask the Appeal Committee to choose whether…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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.…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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.…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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…
Story
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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North America governance, transfer-market behavior, and member process monitoring.
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