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

[David Conrad]

Hi,

On Feb 28, 2013, at 2:50 AM, Jackson Muthili <jacksonmuthi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Form a new RIR, and with AfriNIC's current burn rate, it is ENTIRELY
>> possible that IANA could be lobbied to take space from AfriNIC and give it
>> to the new RIR considering our burn rates.
> 
> This is possible?? Someone at IAINA can explain how?

Haven't been at IANA for a few years now (I left ICANN in 2010), but I'm confident I can say no, IANA staff can't unilaterally reclaim space, at least today.  The only thing IANA staff could even in theory do is update the top-level IPv4 registry at  http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml, which would likely only confuse the few folks who even know that registry exists.  Well, OK, IANA staff could pull the reverse delegation for a /8 block, but that'd just annoy people (and put yet another nail in the reverse DNS coffin).

Not that IANA staff would ever do this -- as Adiel points out, there is no policy that would allow ICANN do anything like this.

Folks can (and do) lobby for IANA staff to reclaim space all the time ("MIT has more address space than China!") but all IANA staff can do by themselves is confuse matters.

Note that in the future, RPKI may change this equation somewhat.

>> So, why create an Arabic RIR... let's stop and question what COULD be motivations

My guess (and I have no real data to back this up) is that this is yet another example of folks from the ITU world not understanding how the Internet governance structures actually work.  From SM's comments earlier, I suspect a few government types used to how the ITU operates think ICANN is similar and they can petition ICANN to create a new RIR from the top down, not realizing that ICANN has no power to actually do that.  The _only_ way a new RIR can be created is from the bottom up: ISPs within a region deciding they want to form a new RIR, building both intra-regional and extra-regional consensus, setting up a viable structure, and then approaching ICANN for recognition and resource allocation.

Regards,
-drc