[Community-Discuss] Share About Cloud Innovation Ltd and their business

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <CALm9Cbn+R9oen9+9YBjfbK5gGTcmEmZ1yhxgDfw04OTC3MxeZg at mail.gmail.com>
Meriem Dayday <meriemdayday at gmail.com> wrote:


>This is a direct violation of the CoC.


No, actually, it isn't.

The information about how Cloud Innovation is presently making use of
it's assigned 6,291,456 AFRINIC-administered IPv4 addresses is effectively
public information, and it is not difficult to derive from any number of
public sources (e.g. RIPEStat, bgp.he.net, etc.)

If you lived in the time of Galileo Galilei, would you consider it an
affront to public decency if some people elected to look through the
telescope and then just describe what they saw?  And if so, then what
is next?  Book burning?


>Disclosing such information and data without the company's consent is a

>clear attempt of defamation and can have legal consequences on the

>concerned person.


OK, let's parse that statement, because it conjoins two different obvious
logical problems.

First, the Internet is *not* a private network.  Fact's about what various
companies are doing on the Internet are possible to see, and to learn,
without needing the consent of the companies inolved.  That is the nature
of the Internet.  If you want to run your own closed private intranet,
then go head.  Nobody will stop you and you can then keep every last
detail of your corporate operations utterly secret.  But the minute any
company obtains Internet number resources and starts using those, it
*voluntarily* gives up some of its corporate secrecy in exchange for being
a part of, and a participant on this great communications experiment we 
call the Internet.

I personally am not now, and never have been a customer of Cloud Innovation.
And yet even well before today I already determined for myself that well
more that 90% of Cloud Innovation's assigned AFRINIC-administered IPv4
address space was being deployed to other continents.  This is not a state
secret by any means, and the information may be derived from 100% public
sources.  Anyone clever enough to seek it out will find the same information.

Whether the manner in which Cloud Innovation is using/deploying its
assigned number resources does or does not comport with its specific
RSA and/or with community approved regulations is a separate question,
and one which I myself do not have an answer to.  In any case, the
courts will sort out those questions in due course, I imagine.  But the
mere facts of how Cloud Innovation has deployed its AFRINIC-assigned
resources, or how it would appear to make money, based on the available
public evidence, are *not* corporate secrets.  Any attempt to portray
them as such is just an attempt at heavy-handed censorship.

The second logical problem with the statement above is contained in the
part that says "... attempt of defamation and can have legal consequences
on the concerned person."

Exactly so!  If the guy who posted the material you are reacting to was
willing to take the legal risk to post that material, IN SPITE OF the
possibility that he could, at least in theory, be sued for defamation,
then why are YOU worried about it?  Why should AFRINIC be worried about
it?  Obviously, this (theoretical) possibility of a defemation lawsuit
is only a problem for the guy who posted the (allegedly) defamatory
text, and he obviiously was willing to take the risk in order to express
his opinion, SO WHAT IS THAT TO YOU?

Here again, shouting down in the original poster in this manner appears
to me to be just another a heavy-handed attempt at pointless censorship.

I hope that we here can all have open and frank discusions of all of the
issues now of concern to AFRINIC without these kinds of attempts to
muzzle dissenting viewpoints based on perfectly silly arguments.


Regards,
rfg