naipr and South Africa

[Daniel Karrenberg]

  > Michael Dillon <michael at MEMRA.COM> writes:
  > On Wed, 19 Feb 1997, Mark J Elkins wrote:
  > 
  > > named?).  Anyway - we are in the process of sorting out our own local
  > > NIC - hopefully with an influence that covers most of Africa.  
  > 
  > The way you worded this makes it wound like you plan to have some sort of
  > national NIC in the RSA and then extend it to serve the rest of the
  > continent. If this is so, I would suggest that you should reconsider how
  > this is being done and get other countries in your continent involved in 
  > a truly international effort from the beginning. I can understand that the
  > political situation would make it hard to get everybody to agree but it
  > should still be possible for most African countries to sit down at one
  > table and agree to run the IP allocation infrastructure for the continent.
  > 
  > And there is probably no need to rush into this either. IP allocations
  > should be done for engineering reasons, not political or nationalistic
  > ones.

Amen!
A pan-African regional registry is an excellent idea, but it requires
true international support. That is hard to build and takes time.
Needless to say the RIPE NCC is very much willing to support any serious
effort in this direction.

Daniel