[Community-Discuss] AFRINC being sued

[Owen DeLong]

> On Aug 20, 2020, at 01:58 , Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com> wrote:

> 

> Hi Jordi,

>  

> So, again you’re making suppositions.

>  

> Firstly – you are assuming that the people who had their space transferred out from under them would have received any notification whatsoever if this was a database modification – there is no guarantee of that.

> Secondly – you are neglecting the fact that legacy resources are not bound by the same policies and rules and never have been.  The logic in this is pretty simple really.  Legacy resources were transferred into AfriNIC from other RIR’s.  This was done without the willing consent of the holders of said space, and therefore, at least my understanding of this is, you cannot impose the rules of a new organization on someone who had their space transferred to AfriNIC without their willing agreement.  To do so would almost certainly be open to challenge, since you are binding someone to a contract that they never agreed to be bound to.


This gets tricky… In theory, AfriNIC is a successor in interest to the contract with the prior registries. Where this is a problem is in that there is no actual contract, only a somewhat implied contract which gets even trickier because the implied contract mutated over time and so virtually every legacy holder has a different idea of what that is.

OTOH, one can also argue that AFRINIC has no obligation to honor a contract with a legacy resource holder since AFRINIC didn’t enter into any sort of contract with said legacy holder, either. IP addresses are integers, not property. AFRINIC technically doesn’t hand out IP Addresses, it records registrations associating numbers to organizations in order to help insure uniqueness within a certain boundary. That boundary is the set of organizations cooperating with the RIR system for internet addressing.

Any organization can use any address it wants on any network that will accept their use. There is no force of law or regulation in most jurisdictions that will prevent this. The accepted norm of treating the RIR databases as authoritative and cooperating with them is a functional expedient and nothing more. It would be destructive to the internet and to the RIR system in general if the RIRs were to start arbitrarily deleting legacy registrations, so I think it very unlikely that they would do so. However, to argue that they have a contractual obligation not to do so is an interesting perspective given the lack of contract you describe above.
 

> Hence – if the space is legacy – and they chose not to update the database – no they are NOT in violation – because the rules are different when it comes to this space. 


From the very earliest days, updating the database was a requirement of receiving an address registration. It may not have been spelled out explicitly in a contract, but it was certainly an expected norm of behavior at least.

Owen


>  

> Andrew

>  

>  

> From: JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via Community-Discuss <community-discuss at afrinic.net> 

> Sent: Thursday, 20 August 2020 11:50

> To: General Discussions of AFRINIC <community-discuss at afrinic.net>

> Subject: Re: [Community-Discuss] AFRINC being sued

>  

> Hi Andrew,

>  

> May be an English nit, but in Spanish when I say “involved” in this context, it means “those that participated in the illegal/against the CPM action”.

>  

>  

> The CPM and RSA allows the board for those “involved” to cancel the account. No need for waiting for any courts decision. I understand this is what has been done, I was just wondering if we were in case 1, 2, or 3. I think it will be good to know and this is not information that need to be hidden until the court decision, the community has the right to know that *now*, as it can help to clarify if we need better policies, or whatever, to avoid that in the future.

>  

> I understand that some resources may have been transferred without the knowledge of the legitimate holders. However, if you’re a holder and you didn’t realized that, it means that you’re not updating your records? It means that you’re not using those resources? Is not all that also against the CPM/RSA?

>  

> Regards,

> Jordi

> 

> @jordipalet

> 

>  

> 

>  

>  

> El 20/8/20 10:35, "Andrew Alston" <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com <mailto:Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com>> escribió:

>  

> Jordi,

>  

> “All the involved resource-holders should lose their rights”

>  

> This assumes that the resource-holders who have legitimate rights to the IP space had any awareness of the transfers – which in this case is not reality – the transfers were illegitimate the IP space was stolen from the resource holders.  So – what you are proposing is to penalize those who had resources stolen from them without their consent or knowledge.

>  

> I point out that it has already been public acknowledgement over the fact that there are criminal proceedings on going against a former member of staff who was allegedly involved in the theft of these resources – please – lets not fan the flames by making inflammatory suggestions that don’t take into account all of the facts as currently known.

>  

> Andrew

>  

>  

>  

> From: JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via Community-Discuss <community-discuss at afrinic.net <mailto:community-discuss at afrinic.net>> 

> Sent: Thursday, 20 August 2020 09:44

> To: community-discuss at afrinic.net <mailto:community-discuss at afrinic.net>

> Subject: Re: [Community-Discuss] AFRINC being sued

>  

> I've some points here:

> 

> 1) Were those transfers done following the Intra-RIR policy? Or it happened before that policy existed?

> 2) Were those transfers inter-RIR?

> 3) In any case, were those transfers authorized by the staff (according to the CPM)?

> 

> If any of those questions indicate that the CPM has not been followed, all those resources should be claimed back and the involved resource-holders should lose their rights and the membership account closed, right?

> 

> Regards,

> Jordi

> @jordipalet

> 

> 

> 

> El 19/8/20 23:04, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com <mailto:rfg at tristatelogic.com>> escribió:

> 

> For those few of you who may not already be aware of this...

> 

> https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/363694-man-connected-to-african-ip-address-heist-sues-afrinic.html <https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/363694-man-connected-to-african-ip-address-heist-sues-afrinic.html>

> 

> As many of you might imagine, I will have more to say about this in due

> course.

> 

> 

> Regards,

> rfg

> 

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