[rpd] Fwd: [members-discuss] African IXP Association Statement Regarding AFRINIC Bank Account Freeze

[Noah]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kyle Spencer <kyle at stormzero.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2021, 17:15
Subject: [members-discuss] African IXP Association Statement Regarding
AFRINIC Bank Account Freeze
To: members-discuss <members-discuss at afrinic.net>


Dear AFRINIC and fellow members of the community,

Below (and attached) is the African IXP Association's statement
regarding the freezing of AFRINIC's bank accounts in response to the
litigation initiated by Cloud Innovation Ltd.

A copy of this statement can also be found at the following URL:
https://www.af-ix.net/news/2021/08/statement-regarding-afrinic-bank-account-freeze

The Arabic, French, and Portuguese translations were voluntarily
contributed by the members of our community.

Regards,
Kyle Spencer

#### BEGINNING OF STATEMENT ####

To whom it may concern,

We, the African IXP Association (Af-IX), are writing in reference to
the freezing of AFRINIC's bank accounts in response to litigation
initiated by Cloud Innovation Ltd.

Our membership consists of 47 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in 35
countries that collectively function as the core of Africa’s Internet
ecosystem which approximately 452 million people use on a daily basis.

The African IXP Association recognises AFRINIC as the Regional
Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa. AFRINIC has served our region
since 2005 through a community-led “bottom-up” process. As the RIR, it
manages key technical resources and services that are essential to the
development and operation of the critical Internet infrastructure that
our members provide. This includes, but is not limited to, the
delegation and management of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses; the
WHOIS service; and the publication of Reverse DNS zones.

The freezing of AFRINIC’s bank accounts prevents it from paying its
own staff and operational costs including third party services which
include, but are not limited to, data center colocation and Internet
bandwidth.

If AFRINIC’s bank accounts remain frozen, it could be evicted from
third-party data centers, disconnected from the Internet, or otherwise
rendered incapable of delivering the services which our members and
the regional Internet depend on.

While our members’ infrastructure, and the Internet more generally, is
engineered to endure brief outages of these services, a protracted
outage would have a significant impact on the security and stability
of Africa’s telecommunications ecosystem as well as the region’s short
and long term economic, social, and political landscape.

We are also concerned that this action has severely limited AFRINIC’s
ability to defend itself against litigation which could potentially
destabilize or even bankrupt the organization.

In light of the above, we urge the courts of Mauritius to allow
AFRINIC to access its bank accounts in a manner that addresses these
concerns and reasonably protects the interests of all stakeholders
during the legal proceedings.

We hope that the above contributions prove useful in your
deliberations. If you have any questions or would like to discuss any
aspect of this letter in more detail, please do not hesitate to
contact us.

Regards,
The African IXP Association (AFIX)
_______________________________________________
Members-Discuss mailing list
Members-Discuss at afrinic.net
https://lists.afrinic.net/mailman/listinfo/members-discuss
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