Intelligence
Latest Articles
Latest intelligence on infrastructure operators, policy decisions, market moves, and digital power shifts.
Story
When “Must Remove” Became AFRINIC’s Operational Duty
Resolution 201803.395 was a brief corporate decision with a long technical shadow. By ratifying a policy that required the removal of persistently lame reverse-DNS nameserver attributes, AFRINIC’s Board did not acquire regulatory power; it accepted responsibility for making a…
Story
AFRINIC’s March 2018 continuity test: two interim offices, one elected seat
Between 22 and 26 March 2018, AFRINIC’s Board moved through a tightly sequenced leadership transition: it sought signed resignations, installed Abibu Ntahigiye and Christian Bope as interim chair and vice-chair, put a review deadline on those appointments, and treated Sunday…
Story
The Three-Month Cure: What AFRINIC Draft 5 Did—and Did Not—Authorise
Three months stood between public identification and the proposed recovery of an Internet number resource. After trying to contact the member and correct an observed discrepancy or non-compliance, AFRINIC would publish the resources concerned; during the interval, the…
Story
Five Seats, Fourteen Days: What AFRINIC’s Second Appeal Charter Actually Changed
On 26 November 2017, AFRINIC approved a redesign of five reviewer seats while leaving an appellant just fourteen calendar days to challenge a policy chair’s decision. That juxtaposition matters. A filing window determines whether an objection can be heard; a composition rule…
Story
The appeal with a clock, but no door out of the house
On 9 November 2017, Draft 2 of AFPUB-2017-GEN-002 rearranged the controls of AFRINIC’s proposed policy process. One Chair and an assisting Vice-Chair became two chairs, each placed nearer the levers of discussion, phase progression and rough-consensus assessment. An appeal no…
Story
The consensus receipt Draft 7 never showed
On 26 December 2017, AFRINIC’s co-chairs described a Last Call dominated by repeated petition letters and one substantive objection, then urged immediate Board ratification. A later official review looked at that same procedural stage and found considerable opposition, no…
Creators
Paolo Lucente built the junction between traffic and routing data
Paolo Lucente’s pmacct sits where packet and flow records acquire routing context. By joining traffic with BGP, BMP, RPKI and operator-defined pipelines, it can support peering and capacity decisions—provided the network preserves sampling, timing and business provenance.
Creators
Claudio Jeker: Maintaining a small, auditable BGP daemon for serious routing
Claudio Jeker has spent more than two decades keeping OpenBGPD small enough to audit and capable enough for serious routing roles. The project’s restraint reduces some software risks, but it cannot simplify BGP policy, routing-security dependencies or the consequences of a bad…
Afrinic SAGA
After the Silence: What AFRINIC’s 2017 Written Cure Needed to Prove
AFRINIC’s members heard the audited statements without recorded objection, yet the annual meeting never adopted them. A later 78 per cent resolution offered a sensible repair—but only a distinct, traceable member act could close the gap left by silence.
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
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
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.…