[rpd] [Community-Discuss] Unaddressed queries by AFRINIC during AGMM

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jun 29, 2021, at 05:59 , Fernando Frediani <fhfrediani at gmail.com> wrote:

> 

> What bylaws have to do with rules about IP space usage resources ? Why does it keep been mentioned as something that can allow or disallow resource usage in or out of the region ? Please stop creating more confusion.

> The rules the apply are ONLY what are the CPM and are made by the community in a bottom up process. Bylaws are not made in a bottom up process but by members only, so let´s just not use bylaws as a justification for this topic. Bylaws can only regulate membership.

> 

The only one confused about what bylaws can and can’t do is you. The bylaws are the overarching governing document of the corporation. Literally equivalent to its constitution (and in some versions literally referred to as the company’s constitution), the supreme rule governing all other behaviors and policies within the corporation. Nothing has the power to override the bylaws within the company short of a government regulation or statute.

By regulating membership, the bylaws create a gate that is controlling for who can receive resource registrations. No membership, no resource registrations. Membership cancelled — resources get unregistered (though there is a great deal of ambiguity on the exact order of operations, process, and other details of how this can be implemented which may leave AFRINIC somewhat exposed in the event the actually act on such a thing).

If the bylaws prohibit the issuing of resources to companies founded on a Tuesday, there’s no way for that t one overridden through the CPM or the PDP. The company simply can’t (without risking a law suit) act in a manner that is prohibited by its bylaws regardless of what other effort has been made to countermand the bylaws in some other document.

> Also please note that LACNIC goes in the same line than AfriNic about resource utilizaton out of the region. This was already confirmed by the RIR and some of its NIR staff as their understanding. This makes sense and goes in line with RIRs that simply didn't choose to go in the path of total liberalization because that is of the interest of a few specific companies who started to profit from the IPv4 exhaustion.

> 


Yes… LACNIC has this codified in their policy manual in section 1.14. There are exemptions and loop-holes in some cases, but generally, no more than 49.999% of any LACNIC resource holder’s space may be used entirely outside of the region without at least some form of direct connection to the region.

The key point here is that this restriction is actually codified in LACNIC policy in their policy manual and was adopted by their community through their policy development process as it existed at the time of adoption.

> Now we have to believe in the fallacy that addressed were not distributed to RIRs in blocks and that RIRs have specifics rules made by specific communities with different needs just because of time-zones and convenience. If it was so simple to justify resources to be used anywhere there would be a global pool and global policies. Why then a global policy years ago was put in place to allocate a /8 to each RIR individually ? Following that logic this wouldn't be necessary.

> 

I don’t know where this comes from. Of course addresses were distributed to RIRs in blocks.
Of course each RIR has its own specific rules made by its community through its PDP.
However, those rules need to be the rules actually developed by the community and there’s no out of region prohibition codified in AFRINIC policy except for the narrow one contained in the soft landing policy which specifically covers only addresses issued after the beginning of Exhaustion Phase 1.

(Specifically 5.4.4 et seq of the AFRINIC CPM)


> What is wrong with "protectionist mentality" ? It is better to assure resources as used for what they have always been meant to be than they are free for speculation and missusage bringing not Internet benefits, social and economic benefits to the region.

> 

Whether or not a “protectionist mentality” achieves the goals you describe is a debate well beyond the scope here. In general, protectionism has been pretty thoroughly debunked as bringing more dysfunction than benefit.

You are also making a number of assumptions here that out-of-region use somehow automatically comes with speculation and/or misuse, neither of which is a valid premise. There can be speculation and misuse of addresses even without out-of-region use and there can certainly be fairly conventional use without speculation out of the region. Indeed, speculation is a term usually applied to derivatives and margin-based investments such as trading in options, futures contracts, and/or practices such as short selling, none of which apply in this context. I don’t believe that I have ever, prior to your message, heard leasing referred to as a “speculative transaction”.

> It is very fair to hold resources in other they can be used for what they meant to be, and in/for the region, so for thrid-part companies come, establish a legal local company, get addresses from the RIR and lease it to some other organization from another region that according to the rules of their RIR are not allowed to get more IPv4 addresses in a clear way to circumvent the rules in place. The situation is the same for all, rules must apply equally so let's abide to them equally, not with beautiful words to try make wrong things right.

> 

Here’s the problem you have…

Let’s say company NMSC has a large network and provides addresses to their connectivity customers all over Asia, and Europe using addresses they got from AFRINIC. NMSC has its headquarters and a great deal of its infrastructure in Africa, but many of its customers are over seas and rather than go to each RIR to get addresses, it simply uses the block of addresses it obtained from AFRINIC to number all of them. It even has roughly half of its allocation that has never been recorded as registered to a customer or even announced on a router (in relatively gross violation of policy as written).

Yet it seems unlikely anyone will be pushing to go after such a company.

Now, let’s say that the same exact international customers were, instead, getting their addresses from a different African company for the exact same purpose and use. They’re getting their connectivity locally from providers in Europe and Asia, but they’re operating as “BYOA” customers on those providers' networks.

It’s the exact same utilization of the exact same amount of AFRINIC address space for the exact same purpose, but somehow you suddenly claim that it’s not allowed.

You have yet to show a single paragraph of policy which actually prohibits it in any of the three governing documents (CPM, RSA, or bylaws) (other than 5.4.4 et. seq which has a very limited scope applicable only to registrations issued after the beginning of Exhaustion Phase 1).

So… I’m not saying an RIR can’t have a policy to prohibit out of region use or a policy to prohibit leasing without connectivity. Heck, I’m not even saying that an RIR community can’t prohibit leasing even with connectivity, though I have trouble understanding how you would run a functional or useful RIR with such a policy.

What I am saying is that AFRINIC has no such policy. One community member once proposed a policy aimed somewhat at this topic, and said policy was rebuffed by the community and did not gain consensus, eventually being withdrawn by the author.

If you want AFRINIC to have policies prohibiting out of region use or leasing, then by all means, propose them and let’s see how the community reacts.

However, having AFRINIC enforce policies that don’t actually exist, well, that’s a gift from the bad idea fairy and we should reject all gifts from that particular source.

Owen


> Fernando

> 

> Em 6/29/2021 6:01 AM, Owen DeLong escreveu:

>> 

>> 

>>> On Jun 26, 2021, at 18:53 , Fernando Frediani <fhfrediani at gmail.com <mailto:fhfrediani at gmail.com>> wrote:

>>> 

>>> In the recent times as IPv4 exhaustion advances it's becoming more and more common to see defenses for a total liberalization in a "no rules scenario" of IP space regulation using nice words as "new economic, technical, and legal realities".

>>> 

>>> The reality is that that most benefited from that are only a few companies who financially benefit during these difficult times, regardless of things like fairness and economic and social development of a region. These actors know the value of this market will have its peak and then will start to come back down, so it is somehow understandable the pressure we have been seen to try to make some absurds like IP leasing to non-connectivity customers or use out of the region as something "normal and acceptable".

>>> 

>> Regardless of who does and does not benefit, the reality is that short of an actual government with the ability to enforce its rules using guns and prisons, people who can make a profit are going to do what they are going to do. I’m not particularly happy about this reality, but I do recognize that it is, in fact, reality and I’m not in favor of giving RIRs guns or the ability to incarcerate people. Contracts only get you so far and clever people can always find ways to comply with the letter of a contract while circumventing the other party's intent if they want to try hard enough.

>> 

>> So no, these are not “nice words”, they are the recognition of unpleasant and inconvenient truths that like it or not, we are faced with new realities, economic, technical, and legal.

>> 

>> In many countries legal frameworks the lack of a transfer policy allowing registrants to monetize the transfer of their registrations could be considered either restraint of trade or an anti-trust/anti-competitive matter.

>>> It is not by chance that some RIRs Community have chosen that majority of addresses must be used within in the region and the impacts it has on the social and economics of that region. It is a loss when every new company or entrepreneurship struggles to launch a new business due to the lack of addresses in the region that were taken way to be used elsewhere and these type of situations cannot simply be taken as "new economic, technical, and legal realities". In those scenarios where only a few actors earn their chunk of money regardless the losses to the region such movements can't be accept as something natural.

>>> 

>> Which RIRs communities would that be? I believe you can only point to one RIR that actually has such a policy on the books.

>> 

>> Further, there is no lack of IP addresses, only a lack of IPv4 addresses. That is the new technical reality and the sooner we face that head on, the better off we will all be.

>> 

>> Addresses were never distributed to RIRs with the intent for those addresses to be regionally restricted. Instead, RIRs were created for the purposes of providing convenience in terms of time-zones, the manageability of a policy forum for the community, and to some extent language support.

>> 

>> This protectionist mentality about regional restrictions on addresses is a very recent phenomenon.

>>> 

>>> It was probably in the line of "new economic, technical, and legal realities" the some RIRs didn't choose to have soft landing phases which certainly leads to a significant unfairness to newcomers and new business coming up and also to a higher market concentration. Fortunately for the less economic-developed regions in the world (LACNIC and AfriNic) this didn't happen and this discourse of "new economic, technical, and legal realities" was not predominant.

>>> 

>> Again, to the best of my knowledge, there’s only one RIR that chose not to have a soft landing policy.

>> 

>> How is it fair to hold addresses that are needed for use to day in reserve for an unknown possible future need that may or may not come to fruition before the protocol is rendered obsolete? That’s neither fair to existing organizations, nor is it the best use of resources to keep them on the shelf.

>> 

>> Until very recently, within the ambit of legitimate need, internet resources (names and numbers) have been issued on a first-come-first-served basis. WIPO eventually managed to corrupt this in the names arena by creating a tragic juxtaposition of trademarks and domain names (which is incredibly poor because of the realities of trademarks being multiple overlapping namespaces while any given TLD is a single namespace). The classic example is that for decades, Apple Computer (founded 1976) and Apple Records (founded by the Beatles in 1968. In the trademark realm, because there is no likely confusion (at the time) between a Record Label and a Computer Manufacturer, the two uses of the same name did not conflict. Try that with Apple.com <http://apple.com/> (which went to the computer company entirely because of first-come first-served rules, but which under the messy IANA processes can’t be subsequently claimed by Apple Records in a trademark dispute because both trademarks legitimately hold the name.

>>> 

>>> During the first discussions of Inter-RIR transfer policy, while AfriNic was still on Phase 1 of the soft landing we could see a big concern of several people about possibility of IP space be simply stolen from Africa and I believe that is still a concern of many and I doubt that these many would find it normal things like out of region usage or IP leasing.

>>> 

>> Yet neither of those things is against current policy if one applies a plain text reading of the rules. Indeed, it would take incredible effort to contort the rules to claim they prohibit out of region use. OTOH, given that nearly every single LIR in every single RIR engages in some form of IP Leasing, I think it’s very difficult to claim that this is either prohibited by policy or abnormal.

>> 

>> If you think that they are against policy, please point to the appropriate and relevant sections of the CPM, RSA, or bylaws.

>> 

>> Wishing does not make it so. If you don’t want those things to be considered normal, then either point to the section of policy that prohibits them, or draft a policy proposal and try to get it to consensus.

>> 

>> Until then, please re-read the CPM, RSA, and bylaws with a critical eye considering the plain-text meaning of the documents and consider what they actually say instead of what you wish they said or think they should have said or think the community wants.

>> 

>> Owen

>> 

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