[AFRINIC-rpd] AFRINIC Response to Government Calls for an Arab RIR

[Owen DeLong]

On Feb 26, 2013, at 12:57 PM, Nii Narku Quaynor <quaynor at ghana.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Feb 26, 2013, at 20:19, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
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>> 
>> Right... Since the establishment of ARIN, each RIR created has been created by reducing the service region of one or more other RIRs.
>> LACNIC was created by reducing the service region of ARIN.
>> AfriNIC was created by reducing the service regions of RIPE-NCC, ARIN, and APNIC.
>> 
>> If this RIR were to be created, most likely it would reduce the service areas of RIPE-NCC, AfriNIC, and possibly APNIC, depending on its proposed geographical boundaries.
> 
> ...how does the process terminate?

I'm sorry, Nii, I don't understand the question. Could you specify what, specifically is "the process" and what are your criteria for determining that it has "terminated"?

If you are talking about the process of creating an additional RIR, then I presume it terminates when the ASO/NRO have come to agreement and the new RIR is either up and functioning with a newly find geography and the applicable changes made to the geographies of the existing RIRs.

If you are talking about the general process of communities deciding that they want a region of their own with their own RIR, then I would say that process should be open to any community of sufficient size at any time in perpetuity. I will point out that if the ICP-2 document hadn't allowed for this, neither LACNIC nor AfriNIC would exist. Indeed, if you look at the history of the RIRs, you will see that originally there was only Jon. Later, there was IANA, largely embodied in Jon. Eventually came the DDN NIC (nic.ddn.mil) which was the first non-IANA registry. IANA delegated the address (and domain) management to them. Later this delegation was transferred to the SRI NIC. The first RIR was RIPE NCC which was delegated addressing responsibility for Europe and certain other locations. APNIC was subsequently formed and took on addressing responsibility for Asia Pacific. The SRI NIC contract expired and the new contract was awarded to NSI which began calling it "internic". Note that Internic was still responsible for not only addressing outside of the RIPE/APNIC regions, but also for most of the gTLDs in all regions. Later NSI spun off the addressing portion to ARIN. With the creation of ARIN, all geographies were now served by an RIR, ARIN being the RIR of last resort for all space not claimed by other RIRs. As was noted, RIPE and APNIC already provided services to parts of what is now the AfriNIC region, though a significant portion of Africa did go to ARIN at its creation. The creation of LACNIC (South America, Central America, Mexico, and several Caribbean islands) and of AfriNIC was later welcomed by the existing RIRs as beneficial to their communities.

I see a lot of valid arguments against creating a region for ME/NA, but slippery slope arguments don't really strike me as being among them. I think we are far better off and that it is far more useful to focus on the merits of the proposal in terms of whether it will benefit the applicable community and/or whether it is representative of said community (vs. merely the desire of certain governments) and in terms of whether we have a high degree of confidence that said registry, if established, would preserve and promote continuation of the bottom-up multi-stakeholder inclusive processes that differentiate the present system from the ITU.

Owen