AFRINIC (the Regional Internet Authority for Africa which controls allocations of IP addresses on that continent) appears to be cracking down on people who obtain African IPs and use them elewhere. Community member @aveline shared this announcement:
TLDR: Cloud Innovation has been put on 90-day notice that their IPs are being taken away.
AFRINIC has recently reclaimed over 1 million IPv4s as part of a new initiative to reign in abuse. This comes after a major scandal was reported in 2019 about how an AFRINIC insider profited from enabling this abuse.
The driver for this fraud is global IPv4 exhaustion, where IPs needed in other regions are not available. Hence the temptation is to request IPs in, say, Africa but use them in the US, Asia, or Europe. In the past, AFRINIC did not police well and many were able to exploit this weakness, but it appears times are changing.
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that’s getting serious. But I heard ips bough from one region can be used in other didn’t knew “can be used” is not “permitted to be used”.
1. We are writing to formally demand that you cease and desist from publishing false and defamatory statements regarding Cloud Innovation’s use of IP address resources and our compliance with AFRINIC’s Soft Landing policies.
2. Your article dated 22 July 2021 contains serious and unfounded allegations that we are abusing IP address resources and violating the Soft-Landing policies. We wish to clarify and provide accurate information regarding these policies and our compliance with them.
3. AFRINIC’s IPv4 Soft Landing policy, detailed in Section 5.4 of the Consolidated Policy Manual, was implemented to manage the depletion of IPv4 address space in phases. These phases include the Current Phase, Exhaustion Phase 1, and Exhaustion Phase 2. Each phase begins and ends based on specific criteria related to the remaining address space in AFRINIC’s IPv4 pool.
4. On 16 January 2017, AFRINIC announced that it is approaching Stage 1 of its IPv4 Exhaustion process. On 31 March 2017, AFRINIC announced the start of Phase 1 of the Soft Landing policy for IPv4 Exhaustion. On 19 August 2019, AFRINIC announced that it is approaching Phase 2 of the Soft Landing policy for IPv4 Exhaustion.
5. It is crucial to note that the Soft Landing policies apply from the point of their implementation forward and are not retroactive. Our Registration Service Agreement was signed in 2013, and the Soft Landing policy only started on 31 March 2017. Therefore, it should not apply to any of the number resources we obtained before this date. Any claims that these policies were violated are not only incorrect but also misleading and damaging to our reputation.
6. We demand that you immediately cease the publication and dissemination of these false statements. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but to pursue all available legal remedies to protect our rights and interests.
7. We expect a prompt response confirming that you will comply with this demand and issue a retraction of the false statements.