[rpd] Decisions and summary on policy proposals discussed during the online Policy meeting (AFRINIC 32)

[Gregoire EHOUMI]

Dear Co-chairs and WG During the AFRINIC-32 PPM which was held last week, the proceedings and decisions made by cochairs, raised many concerns. Below are some of them.The video of the meeting is publicly available.Concern-1  objections management————cochairs chose some objections raised and even not-raised, did not say why comments and explanations provided by authors and the participants on the raised and discussed issues were unsatisfactory. Few examples ⁃ Abuse contact proposalThe valid and unresolved objections according to co-chairs decisions were: • Definition of abuse • GDPR compliance  • Impact of legacy resources ⁃ RPKI ROAs for Unallocated and Unassigned AFRINIC Address Spaces The valid and unresolved objections according to cochairs were: • AS0 ROA validity • Certain fear in the community that this proposal may help staff reclaim resources if members failed to pay membership fees. • Lack of a certain mitigation provision APNIC  has in their policy-WG guidelines and proceduresThe valid and unresolved objections according to cochairs were: • the proposed appointment of cochairs  by consensus will create more problems for this community.  • Cochairs should not have hands in consensus  • also Board interference. ⁃ Inter-RIR transfer proposals On the 3 proposals being discussed Cochairs decided that : • one is far from reaching consensus as incompatible with ARIN as per staff. • The other 2 are closerConcern-2 fairness in the proceeding —————————————————— • When rendering their decisions and contrary to what was announced, Cochairs did not question all authors of transfer policy proposals showing bias • Staff’s demand to the WG  to allow them to request official compatibility analysis on each of the proposals from other RIRs was denied  • Authors were not even given chance to respond to the point with ARIN Concern-3 unilateral decisions by cochairs———————————————————— • cochairs decided that Afrinic service region need an inter-RIR transfer policy as matter as urgency  and can’t wait anymore  • Cochairs decided that among the 3 proposals, the one which aims to establish an efficient and business-friendly mechanism to allow a number of resources to be transferred from/to other regions, should be pushed forward  • Cochairs refused to consider the issues and the implementation challenges  raised by the staff impact assessment on proposal • Cochairs decided on which amendments should be made to the selected proposal  for it to move forward.1- Add 12 months delay for a source to be eligible to receive allocation from AFRINIC2- Remove clause for legacy status after transfer 3-Fix clarity on notifications to the other RIRs after the transferIt is obvious that 1) contradicts both problem statement and solution of the proposal preferred by cochairs.Cochairs appear to be deciding and injecting new issues not previously mentioned in working group. Not following due process of hearing authors and the hurry to decide for working group is unacceptable. The cochairs report must rather provide an open issues list of outstanding issues for working group to deliberate on. There had been no attempt by cochairs to gauge consensus throughout the meeting. In the view of all these violations of the PDP, I urge you to reconsider all decisions made during the last PPM and give chance to the WG to appropriately address the open issues and come to the best conclusions for the region.--Gregoire Ehoumi ( on behalf of the authors of WG guidelines and procedures and AFRINIC Number Ressources transfer proposals)
-------- Original message --------From: ABDULKARIM OLOYEDE <oloyede.aa at unilorin.edu.ng> Date: 2020-09-20  8:06 p.m.  (GMT-05:00) To: rpd List <rpd at afrinic.net> Subject: [rpd] Decisions and summary on policy proposals discussed during the online Policy meeting (AFRINIC 32) Dear PDWG Members, Please find below a summary for each of the proposal discussed during the just concluded online policy meeting of AFRINIC 32  

1.      
Simple PDP Update 

This policy defines consensus. It also
proposes that a policy discussed at the PPM does not need to come back for
another PPM for the Co-chairs to arrive at a decision. This can help in
streamlining the work during the PPM and encourages people to use the mailing
list. 

There were lots of irrelevant objections on
the mailing list such as someone registering many emails. We believe that this
does not matter because rough consensus is not about numbers but quality
objections.

However, there is strong opposition to this policy based on the
following: 

a.                  
Oppose the policy because of
the way the consensus is reached. This proposal proposes that the consensus be
reached through a balance of the mailing list/forum and not at the PPM. This
endangers fair consensus and hijacks the policymaking process. Based on
experience, it is during the PPM that most community members focus on policies.


b.                 
Issues around how the chairs
should drop proposals.

c.                  
Trust in the mailing list: Some
strongly believe that anonymous contribution should be allowed while some
believes it should not.

d.                 
Issues around having more than
1 PPM per year and Online PPM because of volunteer burnout. We are all
volunteers and it’s a night job for us. More PPMs mean more time to volunteer
and more chances for burnouts 

e.                 
Some members of the Community
thinks only burning or polarizing issues should be brought to the PPM.

Chairs Decision:   No Consensus

 

 

2.      
PDP Working Group 

This proposal aims at
allowing most of the decisions including chair elections to be determined via
consensus.  This can be reasonable when
the community has the same goal. However, there were a number of objections to
it. These are:

a.                  
Entrusting the WG to make their
decisions by consensus and the appointment of their co-chairs by consensus do
not make sense and is only utopic.

b.                 
People are not policy
proposals, and thus choosing by consensus is splitting hairs with the election
process we already have. Save the consensus for the proposals, and the election
for people.

c.                  
Consensus may even take months,
and this can’t fly when we want to put people in the vacant roles.

d.                 
Co-chairs should not have a
hand in the consensus, but only sit back and let the community decide for
themselves. Additionally, the consensus process is not feasible with a
deadline.

e.                 
Focus on polishing the current
electoral process instead of complicating other untested forms of “election”.

f.                   
The current status quo’s
election should be the only option in choosing for the roles, and not through
less transparent means.

g.                  
Board would be interfering too
much on issues that deal with PDP

Chairs Decision:    No Consensus

 

3.      
Chairs Election Process 

This proposal aims at introducing an online
voting system for the Co-Chairs election. The following are the opposition to
this proposal. 

a.                  
This policy reduces
participation. Equal representation is violated because the board has
unprecedented power. 

b.                 
There is also not enough
information on the logistics of the vote (e-voting).

c.                  
There is a contradiction on when the term ends during the meeting. “The term ends during the first PPM
corresponding to the end of the term for which they were appointed” is not
clear enough, and “A term may begin or end no sooner than the first day of the
PPM and no later than the last day of the PPM as determined by mutual agreement
of the current Chair and the new Chair” contradicts each other.

d.                 
Gender restriction on 3.3.1.3 ,
some community members argue it is impractical and maybe even unfair if we
force both chairs to have different genders.

e.                 
Issues around which voter's register should be adopted 

Chairs Decision: No Consensus

 

4.      
Board Prerogatives 

This proposal aims at clarifying how the
board and the PDWG  works. However, there
were a few oppositions to this proposal except for a specific section.  

a.                  
It seems like a piecemeal approach
to dealing with issues. 

b.                 
Opposition to the section below

“As an exception of the preceding
paragraph, in the absence of elections processes for aspects related to the PDP
(co-chairs, appeal committee), those aspects will be still handled by the board
in consultation with the community. However, this is also a temporary measure
and also specific draft policy proposals should be introduced for that”. The authors agreed to remove the above section hence

Chairs Decision: Consensus provided the
above section is removed 

 

5.      
Policy Compliance Dashboard

The policy proposal seeks to provide a
framework or a policy compliance dashboard be developed by AFRINIC and
incorporated in myAFRINIC (and future member’s communication platforms).  It will allow a periodic review of the policy
compliance status of each member. It will also enable members to receive
automated notifications for any issue. Staff will receive repeated warnings of
lack of compliance or severe violations enshrined in the CPM. However, there
are several oppositions to this proposal, such as:

a.                  
This policy seems to be redundant
of the status quo as violations are already checked and processed by the human
staff.

b.                 
There is already an existing
system of guidelines on keeping track of the violations of members.

c.                  
The policy is not binding and
does not enforce members actually to follow the rules and not violate policies.


d.                 
Ignorance could be a convenient
excuse for violations because one could claim that they never got notified
about their violations.

e.                 
There is no comprehensive
system on how the board should take proper actions once members violate policies,
nor does it give guidelines based on the severity of the violations.

f.                   
This policy takes away
resources that could be used for more beneficial pursuits to AFRINIC for
something existing in the system.

g.                  
It an administrative  process, and this should be left to staff

Chairs Decision:  NO rough Consensus

 

6.      
Abuse Contact Update 

The proposal makes it mandatory for AFRINIC
to include in each resource registration, a contact where network abuse from
users of those resources will be reported. 
The proposal whois DB attribute (abuse-c) to be used to publish abuse
public contact information. There’s also a process to ensure that the recipient
must receive abuse report and that contacts are validated by AFRINIC
regularly. However, there some opposition to the proposal there are:

a.                  
Staff analysis on how it affects
legacy holder not conclusive  (not sure
why this should affect legacy holders) 

b.                 
The proposal doesn’t state what
will be the consequences of one member fails to comply. Why are we creating the
abuse contact when there is no consequence for not providing the abuse contact 

c.                  
Abuse contact email and issues
with GDPR concerning the whois database

d.                 
No proper definition of the
term Abuse

e.                 
To force members to reply to their
abuse email is not in the scope of AFRINIC.

Chairs Decision: No rough consensus 

 

7.      
RPKI ROAs for Unallocated and
Unassigned AFRINIC Address Space

The proposal instructs AFRINIC to create
ROAs for all unallocated and unassigned address space under its control. This
will enable networks performing RPKI-based BGP Origin Validation to easily
reject all the bogon announcements covering resources managed by AFRINIC.
However, there are many oppositions such as: 

a.                  
Allowing resource holders to
create AS0/ ROA will lead to an increase of even more invalid prefixes in the
routing table.

b.                 
Revocation time of AS0 state,
and the time for new allocation doesn’t match. 

c.                  
Other RIRs don’t have a similar the policy therefore, it can not be effective

d.                 
This will become a uniform
policy if it is not globally implemented, which causes additional stress. 

e.                 
Validity period:   if members decide to implement it, is it not
better to recover the space if it is kept unused for too long?

f.                   
How do we revoke the ROA? How long
does it take to revoke it (chain/ refreshing )?

g.                  
What happens if AFRINIC
accidentally issues a ROA for an address in error?

h.                 
It also might affect the
neighbours and involves monitoring of unallocated spaces.

i.                    
Possibility of it being used
against a member who is yet to pay dues.

Suggestions were made to improve the policy
such as 

a)                 
The automatic creation of AS0
ROAs should be limited to space that has never been allocated by an RIR or part
of a legacy allocation.

b)                 
AFRINIC should require the
explicit consent of the previous holder to issue AS0 ROAs in respect of
re-claimed, returned, etc, space.

c)                  
Any ROAs issued under this policy should be issued and published in a way that makes it operationally easy
for a relying party to ignore them (probably by issuing under a separate TA).

d)                 
The proposal should include the
clause “as used in APNIC as to dues not paid on time.”

Chairs Decision: No consensus

 

8.      
IPv4 Inter-RIR Resource
Transfers (Comprehensive Scope)

The proposal puts in place a mechanism to
transfer IPv4 and (some ASN) resources between AFRINIC and other RIRs and between
AFRINIC members/entities. Some conditions are attached to the source and recipient
based on need and disclosure made. The inter-RIR transfers will be suspended if
the number of outgoing IPv4 addresses exceeds the incoming ones for six consecutive
months. However, there are oppositions to it

a.                  
ASN Transfer is not necessary

b.                 
Issue of board inferring: no
board in all of the five RIRs have ever been involved in deciding a transfer or
allocating IP address. It is not the board's responsibility.

c.                  
Suspending clause with no
reinstalling clause. This mainly makes the
policy potentially invalid. 

Chairs Decision: No consensus.

 

9.      
AFRINIC Number Resource
Transfer

a.                  
Not realistic for one-way inter
RIR resource transfer as it has to be reciprocal. One way would never happen as
only global resources can come in and go out 

b.                 
It would be difficult for the recipient
to follow the rules of AFRINIC if they are not in the African region.

c.                  
No need for ASN transfer. If
one is moving regions and doesn't have an ASN in the new region, it can request
and receive from the local RIRs

d.                 
Additional attributes create
none-operational complexity in the whois database.

Chairs Decision: No consensus.

 

10.  
Resource Transfer Policy

This proposal aims to introduce Inter RIR
transfer. However, it has the following opposition 

a.                  
Issues with Legacy holder
transfer is potentially considered none-reciprocal by ARIN

b.                 
Potential abuse of AFRINIC free
pool without the time limit of receiving an allocation from AFRINIC.

Chairs Decision: The proposal is the least
contested of all the 3 competing proposals. However because of the community’s
desire and clear expression for the  need
for an Inter RIR transfer, we, the Co-chairs, believe that in the interest of
the community we should focus on a proposal rather than several similar ones.
This desire was clearly expressed at the AFRINIC 31 meeting in Angola.
Therefore, We suggest that the authors of this proposal make the following
amendments: 

·        
5.7.3.2  Source entities are not eligible to receive
further IPv4 allocations or assignments from AFRINIC for 12 months period after
the transfer.

·        
5.7.4.3. Transferred legacy
resources will still be regarded as legacy resources.

Chairs Decision: Provided that the above are
amended, the decisions is Rough Consensus is achieved             

 

Based on the above, The updated version of the
follow proposal which achieved rough consensus would be posted on the PDWG
website 

1.       Board Prerogatives 

2.       Resource Transfer Policy

Therefore, these two policies are now on
last call. Co-Chair PDWG


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