Afrinic shuts down IP address shutdown over internet shutdowns

A proposal to punish African governments for shutting down internet access by refusing to give them any new IP addresses for a year has been shot down. At a meeting in Nairobi, the body that oversees allocation of IP addresses in Africa – Afrinic – formally killed the idea off, noting that it "might antagonize governments in a …

[Kevin McMurtrie]

It doesn't need to be political. Tell AFRINIC to clean up all their invalid records in their registry. IPv4 addresses are about to become precious and there's no point wasting them on networks that can't be bothered to administer themselves properly.

[Doctor Syntax]

"IPv4 addresses are about to become precious"

So drop the policy and just be economical with addresses. Allocate all the governments the same block.

[sitta_europea]

Why the fuss about IPv4 addresses? They're history.

For piddling little businesses in England I have 281,474,976,710,656 times as many IPv6 addresses as there are IPv4 addresses in the entire IPv4 address space, and it costs nothing - which is considerably less than BT charges me for a single static IPv4 address.

[Anonymous Coward]

SMTP?

[John Savard]

Obvious Cause

Obviously, we wouldn't have this sort of problem if IP addresses in Africa were allocated somewhere quite beyond the reach of African governments, such as in the United States or Britain.

[Wolfclaw]

The governing body probably woke up to find Zebra heads on their pillows as a gentle reminder who is really in charge of African nations !

[rogerthat1945]

Nobody talks about the 77,000 whites murdered/tortured/butchered in South Africa since Mandela and Obama were put in power.

The gang rapes of the aged and babies are also rarely mentioned.

Yet you give them internet.

Go figure the course humanity is taking.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nobody talks about..."

Well then how did you find out? Were you ... using the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hooboy, lookit what I found. On the Internet.

500+ translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

[Jeffrey Nonken]

"Go figure the course humanity is taking."

...That sentence made no sense. Did you mean "coarse"?

[LDS]

Could they stop issuing IPs...

... to Nigerian princes, at least?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not forgetting the 419 scammers who are still rife.

[Anonymous Coward]

Factual inaccuracies

Just a note - the policy was never "killed off" by Afrinic - it can't - the policy is still an active proposal on the policy working group - and will remain until the authors either withdraw it or choose not to modify it for a year after the previous policy meeting.

Afrinic chose to issue a statement against it - but the policy is still alive.

As a second note - tying the election loss of the board member who authored the policy to the policy is again - a dangerous assumption. It is no secret that that board member has taken strong and sometimes controversial stances while seeking specific outcomes and as a result had ruffled many figures. At the same time - it is no secret that before said board member was elected - Afrinic was flirting with bankcrupcy and at the end of that board members tenure turned a million dollar profit in the last financial year. All I am saying is - the election loss - was probably due to many factors - and its disingenuous to tie it to one policy.