[Community-Discuss] Concerns Grow As AFRINIC’s Funds Are Frozen Over IPv4 Dispute

[Noah]

Dear Community,

I thought I should share this interesting article by Doug Madory, Director
of Internet Analysis at Kentik.

Read the article here
https://www.kentik.com/blog/concerns-grow-as-afrinics-funds-are-frozen-over-ipv4-dispute/?s=09

And the most interesting part of the article was the below snip

<snip>

*IPv4: An Increasingly Valuable Commodity*In 2015, I authored one of the
first analyses of the new private market for IPv4 address space. As the
available supply of IPv4 addresses became exhausted and IPv6 adoption
lagged, the demand for IPv4 naturally increased. Markets were established
and what had once simply been a network configuration setting was now an
increasingly valuable virtual commodity.

The dramatic increase in value led to a burgeoning industry of IPv4 brokers
as well as those who would attempt to obtain IPv4 directly from registries
through duplicitous means.



*In 2019, the Department of Justice indicted a man in South Carolina for
fraudulently obtaining over 700,000 IPv4 addresses from North American
registry ARIN estimated to be worth between “$9,850,880 and $14,397,440.”In
a Lightning Talk at LACNIC in 2018, Etienne Sharp blamed “ghost companies”
for spiriting into Latin America, setting up virtual offices to obtain
precious IPv4 address space at little cost, and then proceeding to use the
address space outside the LACNIC region. Russian security company
DDoS-Guard (aka Dancom) was one of those ghost companies in Etienne’s
presentation, and earlier this year, LACNIC revoked its right to use the
address space it obtained from Belize.*

And finally in 2019, internet researcher Ron Guilmette’s analysis uncovered
the “Great $50M African IP Address Heist” in which an AFRINIC employee had
been selling large amounts of the region’s IPv4 address space for personal
profit. It was also Ron’s analysis that contributed to LACNIC’s decision to
revoke DDoS-Guard’s address space.

Since that “heist,” AFRINIC had a change in leadership and has been working
to tighten up its controls around IPv4 allocation. It was this work that
led it to revoke the address space of Cloud Innovation Ltd. That Cloud
Innovation’s IPv4 space is used outside the AFRINIC region is clear and
verifiable — several major U.S. telecoms announce the space on behalf of
their U.S. customers. The case hinges on whether the allocation of the
address space violated AFRINIC policies, as written years ago.
<snip>

Cheers,
*./noah*
*Pontiff without Borders *
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