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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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2,430 articles
Story
Who gets to call consensus? The constitution inside AFRINIC’s PDP Bis Draft 1
Published on 28 April 2017, PDP Bis Draft 1 proposed something larger than a tidy set of meeting rules. It was an internal constitution for the process that would make later number-resource policy. One Chair, assisted by a Vice-Chair, would classify input, control movement…
Story
Thirty-two parts of a request: the queue inside AFRINIC’s Draft 4
On 31 March 2017, AFRINIC’s operative Soft Landing policy entered Phase 1 with a `/13` ceiling. Fourteen days later, on 14 April, Draft 4 proposed a `/18` ceiling instead. That was not a cosmetic adjustment. It would have reduced the largest request event from 524,288 addresses…
Story
The Five Layers Behind AFRINIC’s 2016 Accounts
AFRINIC’s Board approved a signed, audited statement set on 19 April 2017, but the strength of that record lies in what it proves—and in its unusually legible limits—not in the comforting shorthand that the accounts were simply “audited and approved.”
Story
Five seats, one Board: AFRINIC’s 2017 appeal contradiction
A entity challenging a PDWG-chair action had fourteen calendar days to appeal, yet the five-seat body receiving that appeal depended on the AFRINIC Board for every appointment and remained exposed to Board replacement power. The 2017 design therefore solved one problem while…
Story
Draft 5’s selective answer to the AFRINIC-26 floor
On 31 May 2017, the AFRINIC-26 meeting room did not give Soft Landing BIS Draft 4 a consensus. What followed is more revealing than either a simple story of acceptance or one of rejection. Draft 5 appeared under two unreconciled official dates—27 June in the revision history and…
Story
The Gate Draft 4 Did Not Change
AFRINIC’s fourth Resources Review draft is a lesson in why institutional power must be read through redlines, not impressions. The politically sensitive review gate was plainly present in Draft 4, but it was inherited from Draft 3. Draft 4’s own changes came later in the…
Story
The seven seats that framed AFRINIC’s fee question
Resolution 201701.324 did not decide what AFRINIC’s members should pay. It decided who would be allowed to organise that question first. By approving a Fees Review Committee and naming seven members, the Board created a compact channel through which assumptions about services…
Story
The consent that changed IANA’s numbering operator but kept ICANN on the hook
AFRINIC Resolution 201609.300 was a small corporate act with a large design lesson: when a critical registry service moves to an affiliate, continuity depends less on institutional prestige than on whether consent, performance, liability, records, remedies and replacement remain…
Story
AFRINIC’s litigation story needs an incentive timeline
The dispute with Cloud Innovation became a continental governance crisis, but labels such as aggressor or defender obscure the control question: who could prolong each case, who authorised that action and who was paid when it continued?
Story
ICANN and Mauritius must separate their AFRINIC powers
ICANN can question whether AFRINIC still satisfies recognition criteria, while Mauritius’ courts determine the receiver’s legal authority. Treating those two powers as interchangeable would deepen the registry’s legitimacy crisis.
Story
AFRINIC’s legal-spend debate needs an audited ledger
An October 2021 engagement letter set a US$1,000 hourly rate and left disbursements uncapped. The document raises serious oversight questions, but only a complete invoice and approval record can establish what AFRINIC actually paid and who authorised it.
Story
A stronger complaint gate cannot carry the whole weight of due process
Draft 3 made an evidence-free complaint less able to trigger an AFRINIC resource review, but left the far more consequential stages after entry substantially where Draft 2 had put them. That asymmetry matters because procedural legitimacy is not secured at the threshold alone: it…
Story
AFRINIC contained a million-address routing incident. Its safeguard record is still incomplete
AFRINIC says it removed IRR entries that helped unauthorised routes from the reserved block 102.224.0.0/12 spread, contacted transit providers and intensified monitoring. Public route history supports much of that account and shows the routes are no longer visible to RIPE RIS…
Story
The Eightfold Cut That Still Had No Mandate: Soft Landing BIS Draft 3 at AFRINIC-25
On 22 July 2016, Soft Landing BIS Draft 3 reduced its proposed Phase 1 ceiling from a `/15` to a `/18`, cutting the maximum request from 131,072 IPv4 addresses to 16,384. The proposal kept the rest of its scarcity machinery substantially in place and went to AFRINIC-25 on 29…
Story
The Unwritten Rule at AFRINIC’s Review Gate
In August 2016, the second draft of an AFRINIC resource-review proposal altered a single verb in the clause governing community complaints. That small edit matters because a private technical registry does not need to reach a final finding before a review begins to impose costs.…
Story
An Invitation to Every Meeting: What Resolution 201608.298 Changed at AFRINIC
On 10 August 2016, AFRINIC’s Board moved from noting legal advice on one agenda item to creating a standing invitation for its Legal Adviser at every Board meeting. That modest-looking change could bring legal discipline closer to decisions, but it also raised a lasting…
Story
From One Sentence to One Morning: What AFRINIC Resolution 201608.297 Actually Made Possible
An August resolution offered one short bridge from a postponed Governance Committee election to a special members’ meeting; by 30 November, that bridge had become a morning of twenty bylaw propositions, a tea break and a tightly timed election for a non-binding advisory body. The…
Story
AFRINIC’s 2016 Strategy Vote and the Two-Year Publication Gap
On 8 July 2016, AFRINIC’s Board unanimously authorised publication of a strategy for 2016–2020. Yet the organisation later said that only an extract appeared that September because the full plan was considered internal; approval to publish the complete document came in May 2018…
Story
Inside the Unseen Table: What AFRINIC Delegated in July 2016—and What It Did Not
On 8 July 2016, AFRINIC’s Board unanimously approved an internal delegation-of-authority document intended to distinguish decisions for the Board, the chief executive and other roles. The table itself is not in the public record. That absence matters because delegation is the…
Story
Four committees, twelve seats, and the mandate record AFRINIC members could not see in one place
On 8 July 2016, AFRINIC’s Board considered a committee composition table already discussed informally at its retreat, reconstituted four temporary bodies with twelve seats between them, and adopted the resolution with one proxy-represented director abstaining. The act looks like…
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