Afrinic crisis forces reform of global IP address management

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25 years ago, the Internet community set rules for the establishment of additional regional registries for IP addresses. It was the starting signal for the establishment of two new Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in Latin America and Africa. However, they did not realize that such an important infrastructure provider could also fail. Due to the ongoing problems with Afrinic in Mauritius, they now want to close regulatory loopholes.

On June 4, 2001, the Internet Coordination Policy-2 (ICP-2) prepared by the address self-administrations in Europe (RIPE), Asia (APNIC) and North America (ARIN) passed the board of the recently founded Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In the early days of the Internet, the Europeans had helped to allocate IP addresses for colleagues in Africa. The North American ARIN took over the same service for Latin America. With IPC-2, the RIRs paved the way for the further decentralization and democratization of global IP address allocation.

The uniform allocation from the common address pool of 4.3 billion IPv4 and 340 sextillion IPv6 addresses is one of the most important basic infrastructures for the Internet. Without IP addresses, there is no connection to the network.

The stumbling block

What it means when an IP address allocation office is no longer fully functional is currently being increasingly felt by network operators in African countries. In various countries, such as Tanzania and South Africa, companies are increasingly complaining that their applications for address allocations are not being processed.

A legal dispute with address trader Lu Heng, CEO of Larus (Hong Kong), and his associated company Cloud Innovation (Seychelles) has paralyzed parts of Afrinic's work. Since 2022, there has been no proper board of directors and no managing director.

Courts in Mauritius, Afrinic's headquarters, have already appointed the second emergency administrator. Administrator Gowtamsingh Tabee has now announced new board elections for June 23. However, the fact that the nomination committee is made up exclusively of British lawyers and that the British company Civica is to operate the platform for electronic voting has met with resistance from parts of Afrinic's membership.

“In its current form, the planned election process violates Afrinic's constitution and the bottom-up principle of multi-stakeholders,” warns Noah Maina, Secretary General of the Tanzanian Internet Service Providers Association and active in many functions within the continent's Internet self-governance. Maina intends to take legal action, if necessary, to enforce a legally correct election within the framework of the constitution.

Afrinic's future uncertain

Hans-Peter Holen, Managing Director of the RIPE NCC and current Chairman of the RIR umbrella organization Number Resource Organization (NRO) after the rotation procedure, emphasized at an online workshop on the ICP-2 successor rules on Tuesday that an update of the rules was overdue after 25 years.

The new policy document on “Recognition, Operation and Withdrawal of Recognition of Regional Internet Registries” accompanies the RIR through its life cycle. It sets out operational obligations.

First and foremost is the non-discriminatory issue of IP addresses to members in accordance with the tried-and-tested non-profit principle. A minimum of formal principles – at least one meeting of the members per year – is intended to safeguard the bottom-up principle, even if it is no longer called that, as IP address expert Randy Bush noted at the workshop.

Safeguarding against unilateral action

To ensure that a registry carries out its processes properly and that the membership is sufficiently involved in line with the idea of self-administration, audits should also check the business as regularly as possible. Holen assured that this has already been done at the RIPE NCC for some time.

Another newly introduced principle obliges the RIRs to prevent possible attempts by individuals or a single company or group to usurp control over self-administration. These concerns have also increased with the clashes between Afrinic and Lu Heng.

Afrinic's emergency administrator referred to “concerns about possible interference” in the process in a circular on the planned election. Two years ago, members of APNIC even warned of a “hostile takeover” in elections. Lu Heng had run for office here together with some employees of the Number Resource Society (NRS). Together with the NRS, Lu is campaigning in the ICP-2 process for IP address holders to be allowed unlimited address transfers across regions. He believes that this would create competition among the RIRs.

De-recognition

As a last resort against a dysfunctional RIR, the NRO wants to reserve the right to de-recognize the RIR status in the future. This can be initiated by an RIR, but also by a quarter of the members of the RIR in question. In an orderly process, the IP addresses should then be transferred to a successor organization or an interim administrator in the event of revocation.

There are still some requests for changes in the ongoing consultation process with the community. For example, some members believe that the unanimity required for recognition or removal decisions is too high a hurdle. At the request of the community, the NGO members who prepared the draft had already included the option for an affected RIR to appeal to the ICANN Board again after the withdrawal of recognition.

At the workshop on Tuesday, Constanze Bürger, a German member of the NGO and official in the Ministry of the Interior, promised that every single proposal for the policy document would be examined and discussed very carefully. She had applied to RIPE for IPv6 addresses for the federal government in 2009.

The Afrinic situation has triggered something, she says. In her opinion, Lu Heng's proposals for unrestricted transfers between regions contradict the very idea of a decentralized, democratic RIR system. Comments on the future policy document can still be submitted until May 27.

(dmk)