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ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election

131 pointsposted 14 hours ago

by rntn

(theregister.com)

47 Comments

this15testing

13 hours ago

it's all this guy: https://heng.lu/

who is very outspoken against IPv6 adoption because he wants to capitalize on his v4 holdings. THE END.

I don't know if I've heard a sentence from him that isn't a threat of legal action for something

Spooky23

9 hours ago

That site is unintentionally hilarious. Who knew that selling IP addresses was really an agent for the vague notion of social change lol.

Y_Y

12 hours ago

But he earned those addresses by the sweat of his brow! He's entitled to whatever the market will bear and more, because numbers aren't free!

Loughla

12 hours ago

I don't know who that guy is, but if he's against IPv6, why does he say;

>promotes accountable leadership, fair market practices, and adoption of the next generation of IPv6 addresses.

I learned about him yesterday via this article. It also frames into context articles I've seen in the past about AFRINIC's IPv4 space being lost to foreigners. https://medium.com/@emmanuelvitus/afrinic-hope-hijack-and-th...

A couple months ago he gave a talk Why Buying IP Addresses is a Scam in Washington DC. It's a lot of complaining about who owns IP addresses: https://youtu.be/dAqXo5DB42E?si=7RpoUFXM3KXziN-Y

It appears the entire channel and Number Resource Society is just a front for his own opinions: https://m.youtube.com/@numberresourcesociety

alright2565

9 hours ago

How does his YouTube channel have:

1) 6.3M subscribers

2) <5k views on about half their videos

3) 10M+ views on a random selection of their dullest videos?

arp242

5 hours ago

And their Facebook/Twitter accounts have no meaningful engagement at all. 123 followers on Twitter, which is pathetic. Even I managed to get ~600 followers, mostly from when my blog ended up on the HN frontpage. I barely posted on Twitter. It's a massive discrepancy from their 6.3 million YouTube subscribers. Together with the view count rollercoaster, this does not smell kosher.

So it seems that a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck is engaging in bad faith bullshit behaviour on account of being a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck. I am shocked I tell you. Shocked!

jekwoooooe

8 hours ago

YouTube is willingly complicit in bot activity when it makes their stats look good. They don’t care about bot subscribers or comments as long as it drives engagement

viraptor

12 hours ago

Why is NK called Democratic People's Republic if it's not? The marketing copy can say whatever it needs to.

sethops1

10 hours ago

And America isn't a democracy, it's a Republic.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo

8 hours ago

This is the most infuriatingly incorrect statement.

America is a democracy AND it's a republic AND a bunch of other stuff.

The full description is that America is a Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic.

rbanffy

7 hours ago

Technically “America” is a continent. The country is called “United States of America”. ;-)

And yes, saying it’s not a democracy infuriates me as well, because it’s being used to justify a whole lot of undemocratic shenanigans.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo

7 hours ago

Lol I almost went for that pedantry. However technically America is not a continent (under most definitions of continent) but North and South America are. :P

rbanffy

7 hours ago

America would then be the whole land mass. Or something like that.

SllX

5 hours ago

Unless you grew up in a place that taught a six-continent model instead of a seven-continent model and it was NA/SA consolidated instead of Europe and Asia into Eurasia.

Also: continents are bullshit.

Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.

skissane

3 hours ago

> Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.

As an Australian English speaker, I will normally call it “the US”-the only time I ever call it “America” is when speaking to our 7 year old, because I know she knows what “America” means but I worry “the US” might confuse her; but with older children (such as our 12 year old) and with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me. In everyday speech, “the US” is (in my experience) more common than “America”, although both are understood as referring to the country; for the continent I use the plural (“the Americas”) to avoid the risk of confusion.

SllX

an hour ago

Using "United States" or "the US" is fine, but where "America" is used in the English-speaking world it still predominantly refers to the United States of America; but Australia is a big country. Given a large enough population of individualistic people—and there are a lot of individualistic English-speakers on Earth whether people such as yourself who share your particular hang-up or just contrarians—exceptions are not notable.

JumpCrisscross

an hour ago

> with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me

Sure. But if someone says America, you aren’t confused unless for performative purposes.

rbanffy

4 hours ago

I don't hear it being called "America" here in Ireland. The only place I hear it is in the US, which is how I call it.

SllX

an hour ago

If somebody says "America" to you in Ireland, are you confused about what they are talking about? That's the difference.

yndoendo

9 hours ago

When the Presided of the USA is no longer bound by the Constitution, written law, it is no longer.

thyristan

8 hours ago

Funnily enough, it isn't even a constitutional monarchy then, it regresses beyond that to an absolute monarchy.

rbanffy

7 hours ago

The fact remains the country, as defined by its laws, should be a democracy.

Its people will have a lot of stuff to fix in a couple years.

JdeBP

13 hours ago

Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517053 and https://techdirt.com/2025/07/09/litigious-company-demands-re... I now know what The Register was being so surprisingly careful about.

alienthrowaway

5 hours ago

I was surprised the Register didn't provide the additional context of AFRINIC's revocation of Cloud Innovations IP4 blocks that were being sold anywhere but Africa[1][2][3].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43753738

2. Now-deleted report on involved parties by South African news org https://archive.is/bcSDY

3. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/172579/cloud-innovations-i...

marrickvillain2

11 minutes ago

FYI The Reg has covered the back story - https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/03/nrs_afrinic_review/ - but suffice to say anything written about Cloud Innovation quickly attracts the attention of its lawyers. But evidence is being collected and the full story will one day be told.

user

12 hours ago

[deleted]

huslage

10 hours ago

I’ve posted about this saga on LinkedIn a bunch of times and received a cease and desist every time. These people are rent seeking fools who are holding African addresses hostage for profit.

pityJuke

10 hours ago

As someone entirely unfamiliar with everything here: can ICANN actually do anything to resolve this situation, and I imagine, ideally retrieve the IPs from this unsavoury individual?

turbobrew

7 hours ago

It’s in the article

> ICANN’s letter references a policy [PDF] that allows it to appoint an emergency replacement for a dysfunctional RIR, and states that ICANN reserves all rights to start the process that would make that possible.

pityJuke

5 hours ago

I'm interested why Cloud Innovation say that this is also their preferred ending [0]. A double-bluff?

[0]: https://cloudinnovation.org/cloudinnovation-call-AFRINIC-win...

turbobrew

4 hours ago

It could be a bet that Cloud Innovation would fare better under an ICANN takeover vs AFRNIC re-establishing control? From some articles I have read, the providence of how Cloud Innovation got their IP blocks is either lost or unknown, so maybe they are betting that if ICANN took over they would not touch Cloud Innovation blocks as the windup of AFRINIC would cause records to be lost?

Or it could be a bet that AFRINIC will eventually re-assert control, so the best thing you can do is try to muddy the waters and raise questions about AFRINICs legitimately which will add more procedural muck and further delay control.

turbobrew

7 hours ago

More context: https://medium.com/@emmanuelvitus/afrinic-hope-hijack-and-th...

mkj

13 hours ago

Who are cloud innovation's IP address range customers?

ethan_smith

11 hours ago

Cloud Innovation primarily leases their AFRINIC-allocated IPv4 addresses to entities outside Africa, including datacenters and hosting companies in Asia and Europe, which is precisely what sparked the original legal disputes with AFRINIC over resource utilization policies.

harvey9

13 hours ago

Other articles suggest data centers outside of Africa

mkj

11 hours ago

Is that legal?

toast0

7 hours ago

It's most likely against the IP allocation policy/agreement. Violating an agreement is a civil matter.

However, purposefully entering agreements with intent to violate them can escalate to criminal fraud, amd wire fraud when money is involved. There'a certainly a question of jurisdiction when there's so many localities involved.

MaxPock

11 hours ago

Some corrupt employee sold millions of IPs to this guy and he's been reselling them outside of Africa .

jfengel

10 hours ago

Is that covered by any actual law? Is some government entity responsible? Or is it just an anarchy breaking down?

lazide

10 hours ago

No one wants to get a sovereign country involved in these issues if they can avoid it, because that is an even more giant can of worms. Because then it’s ’whose laws again?’.

And all these matters cross every international boundary as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, it is also enabling this particular situation.

jfengel

9 hours ago

Ah. It sounds like another case where the Internet was built assuming a fair bit of goodwill on behalf of its users. Until we realized that it means that the worst 0.01% now have access to everyone in the world.

lazide

8 hours ago

Though also, the alternatives are rarely much better.

Not that the rest of the world would be feeling great if this was all based out of Washington DC right now eh? Or Beijing. Or Paris. (Depending on who they are)