[Community-Discuss] Dues-paying members?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Way back on July 2, in response to a question I posed on the AFRINIC RPD
mailing list, Nishal Goburdhan <nishal at controlfreak.co.za>, in message
<995E2922-AFB1-4915-B119-BA489E825FF7 at controlfreak.co.za> said the
following:


>“member-only” status, as seen here, is a non-resource holding member of

>afrinic.  as this is an afrinic construct, it would be, by definition,

>non-legacy.  if you find a case of this type of member holding resources,

>you should definitely point that out to the hostmaster team.


On that same day, I elected to write a modest Perl script to see how well
Mr. Goburdhan's assertion matched up with actual reality in the AFRINC
data base as it existed at that time.  It took me well less than a day to
finish and debug the script.  I then ran it against the whole AFRINIC
WHOIS data base.

The script quite certainly found numerous instances of organizations
marked as "MEMBER-ONLY" within the data base but which nontheless had
associated with them one or more IPv4 allocations.  (I did not check for
IPv6 allocations or for ASN allocations to "MEMBER-ONLY" organizations
but will likely do so in the near future.)

I have just fetched a fresh copy of the AFRINIC WHOIS data base and re-run
this same simple analysis script.  The results are presented here:

    https://pastebin.com/raw/n9W0Lcc2

According to these results, there are currently a total of 22 organizations
that are flagged as "MEMBER-ONLY" within the data base, at present, and
which nontheless have one or more IPv4 block allocations.

I already know at least some of the relevant story for the two specific
organizations designated by ORG-AISL1-AFRINIC and ORG-IA41-AFRINIC, but
I would very much like to obtain answers to the following questions with
respect to each of the remaining 20 anomalous organizations listed in the
table linked to above, and with repsect to their associated IPv4 allocations:

   *)  Was Mr. Goburdhan correct in asserting that MEMBER-ONLY organizations
       should have no associated/assigned number resources?

   *)  Are all of the IPv4 blocks listed in the table "non-legacy" blocks?
       If not, then which ones are and which ones are not?

   *)  Are annual fees due and payable, to AFRINIC, for any or all of the 
       IPv4 blocks listed in the table?  Have such fees been due and payable
       to AFRINIC for the entire time since each block, respectively, was
       assigned to its associated organization?

   *)  If the answer to either of the above questions is "yes", then has
       AFRINIC in fact been either collecting and/or receiving such annual
       fees for any or all of the blocks listed in the table?  If not, how
       much revenue has AFRINIC been deprived of by its failure to collect
       annual fees on some or all of the listed blocks?

   *)  Have any of the organizations listed in the table been granted the
       special "MEMBER-ONLY" status as a result of their connections to one
       or more AFRINIC board or staff members?

   *)  For each of the 22 organizations represented in the table, who
       specifically made the decision to grant each one the special
       "MEMBER-ONLY" status?  Was that status granted before or after
       the organizations acquired their associated IPv4 allocations?
       If before, then is it not a part of standard practice at AFRINIC
       to check all IP block allocations, as they are being made, in order
       to insure that they are not being made to MEMBER-ONLY organizations?
       if after, then is it not a part of standard practice at AFRINIC to
       check each organization that is being converted to MEMBER-ONLY
       status in order to insure that it holds no number resources at the
       time of the conversion?

Additionally, I also have two more generalized questions which would seem
to naturally arise in the present context:

   *)  Why has it fallen to me, a mostly disinterested third-party, to
       perform this sort of simple-minded consistancy checking on the
       AFRINIC WHOIS data base?   Is this not the kind of thing that
       AFRINIC could have done and/or should have been doing for some
       years already, even well before I took an interest?  (I mean it
       isn't as if this sort of consistancy checking required either
       genius-level programming skills -or- multiple man-years of effort
       in order to implement.)

   *)  Over the past ten years, other than the various AFRINIC CEOs, which
       specific manager(s) or department head(s) within AFRINIC have been
       most directly responsible for insuring the accuracy, integrity,
       security, and consistancy of the AFRINIC WHOIS data base?

At this point in time I feel somewhat justified in my feeling that the
current board and management may view some or all of the answers to
the above questions as being fundamentally none of my bloody business
and/or subject to some over-arching NDAs that permit them to say nothing
of significance about anything.  Nontheless, I can and still do hope
that some sensible answers will be provided to the above questions.  If
not, then I suppose it will be incumbant upon the membership to decide
if they are comfortable with non-answers to these apparently reasonable
questions, given the present context.


Regards,
rfg