[arin-ppml] AFRINIC And The Stability Of The Internet Number Registry System

[John Curran]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 at 09:44, Lu Heng <<mailto:h.lu at anytimechinese.com>h<mailto:jcurran at arin.net>.lu at anytimechinese.com<mailto:lu at anytimechinese.com>> wrote:

Dear John:

The statements you made are very misleading.

Here are some clarifications:

Cloud Innovation is disputing AFRINIC’s claim that Cloud Innovation is
in breach of the agreement. Cloud Innovation maintains that we are a
compliant member.

1. While I make no comment regarding the justification of our
resources. we have rights just like any other registrant to keep our
justification material confidential. We would like to share some
public data here:
Cloud innovation accounts for 80% of all AFRINIC whois updates in 2021
to date and in AFRINIC whois,  over 10  million (roughly 10% of all
AFRINIC space) IP addresses whois information has not been updated in
more than 10 years. 40million (roughly 40%) IP addresses have not been
updated in more than 5 years. Have all of them been required to
provide re-justification while they don’t bother to update whois?
313 out of 1800 members have not made a single assignment in their
allocations more than a year after receiving. 641 member registered
show less than 50% utilization, while AFRINIC’s CPM 5.5.1.9 requires
at least 50% utilization. All of those member are in violation,
including several major telecoms.
However according to one press we saw, AFRINIC only audited 15 member
and terminated 5 of them,  Cloud Innovation being the most compliant
member in terms of whois update and utilization data provided to
AFRINIC as data shows above.

Mr. Lu (and/or Owen)  -
It is so nice to hear from you elaborate on your extensive righteous behavior.  Perhaps you’ll indulge us a simple yes/no question?

AFRINIC’s RSA contains the following statement -

(The Applicant Acknowledges…) that it is bestowed with an exclusive right of use of those number resources within the ambit of the “need” which it has justified in its application and for no other purpose during the currency of the present agreement;

Is Cloud Innovation’s use of the blocks in question within the remit and purpose for which they were originally justified?

2. I did go to ARIN for resource, ARIN requested customer personal
information down to street names, personal address, all of which we do
not collect in our business from end users due to data privacy
concerns. I have mentioned in one of ARIN’s meeting and received a
consistent answer that it must be provided before the resources can be
allocated. While I later understood it is part of ARIN policy, I still
believe that it is an unwise policy which puts ARIN in possession of a
large collection of personally identifying information (PII).
So abandoning our ARIN application for resources after RIPE ran out,
was a legitimate business decision and IMHO, a morally correct one
made in order to protect the privacy of our customer’s.
John's statement is misleading at best. John himself has repeatedly
stated that ARIN does not deny requests, but that applicant’s often
abandon requests when they are unwilling or unable to provide the
requested data. That’s exactly what happened here. Contrary to John’s
claim, that ARIN refused the application in question, the actual facts
of the matter are that Outside Heaven chose to abandon its request
rather than compromise the confidentiality of its customers and trust
ARIN with such a significant amount of customer PII.

You made an application, provided inconsistent data, and then did not respond when asked provide sufficient details to satisfy reasonable due diligence.   After not hearing back after repeated requests, ARIN denied the request.

If you prefer to characterize it as “abandoning your application” then that is fine.  It is consistent with everything I stated, including that ARIN ultimately denied your request – and that such abandonment was in the face of queries for additional information to clarify the inconsistencies in your request.  We are generally able to get past these situations with the vast majority of organizations with legitimate need for the address space per ARIN policy, but I also acknowledge we cannot know how many of those who did abandon were for non-qualification versus other reasons.

5. Unless ARIN admits it has been given the justification submitted to
AFRINIC by Cloud Innovation in past years, we don't think it is within
ARIN’s mandate to comment whether it is being used for the same
purpose or not.  John, please clarify, have you  received the
justification material we submitted to AFRINIC? Do you have any inside
knowledge about it? We would be very keen to know if AFRINIC has
disclosed our private data to a third party in this process in
violation of the very agreement they (unjustly) accuse us of
breaching.

I have no opinion regarding the justification submitted by Cloud Innovation’s for number resources from AFRINIC, and have not seen it.

I _have_ asked a simple question of whether Cloud Innovation’s usage is within the remit and purpose for which they were originally justified, and I observe that this question has been asked repeated by many others in the AFRINIC community.

This question does seem relevant to the dispute so please don’t be surprised if you are asked it quite often until such is resolved...

Again – Is Cloud Innovation’s use of the blocks in question within the remit and purpose for which they were originally justified?

6. We find your discussion of the RIR stability fund most interesting…
Please correct us if we misunderstand, but our understanding is that
the fund requires the unanimous consent of all 5 RIR CEOs in order to
be utilized. As such, it appears you are attempting to mislead the
community by making a 20% promise as if it were a 100% assurance.

My statement reads -

If AFRINIC requests support in accordance with the Joint RIR Stability Fund, ARIN will support such a request.  Furthermore, and without reservation, ARIN stands by its unwavering commitment to support AFRINIC and will take any and all measures necessary to ensure that neither the African networking community, nor the global Internet number registry system, is operationally impacted during this period. AFRINIC was formed (and has accomplished so much) for the benefit of the African networking community and ARIN stands with the community in dealing with those who seek to disrupt or exploit it for their own benefit.

It’s fairly self-explanatory and of course pertains simply to ARIN’s support for AFRINIC during this period.  If you did not take that away from your reading, hopefully that is now clear.

For the above reasons, we think that Mr. Curran has not provided a
balanced or fully accurate representation of the facts to the ARIN
community here and we hope that the above clarification will help
members of the community come to a more fully informed opinion.

A vigorous discourse is a wonderful thing - I actually welcome your clarifications as noted above (e.g. you prefer to characterize your ARIN request as “abandoned” rather than it having been denied)

You apparently can clarify quite a bit when it suits you, but still fail to respond to the most basic yes/no question - Is Cloud Innovation’s use of the blocks in question within the remit and purpose for which they were originally justified?

Finally, while we realize that this is inappropriate for PPML, as it
does not really touch on any ARIN policy discussion, we believe that
Mr. Curran’s post could not be allowed to stand without rebuttal.
Since he chose to make such a non-policy post to PPML, we felt that
our posting of the rebuttal here was justified.

Unless Mr. Curran or other ARIN staff member(s) choose to further
engage on this topic here, this will be our only post on the matter to
this list. We would also welcome the opportunity to take the
discussion to a more appropriate ARIN list if Mr. Curran prefers that
alternative.

Excellent point.   I have taken the liberty of replying to Owen’s post of these remarks on nanog for clarity, but do indeed suggest we continue this thread here on ppml (so as to spare the NANOG community from further posts.)

Best wishes,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
American Registry for Internet Numbers



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20210827/57bbf04e/attachment.htm>