Africa's Internet Management Body Mired Again by Corruption Allegations

orange shares a report: The organization responsible for allocating internet addresses across Africa has yet again become embroiled in scandal, this time over long-standing claims of corruption. A founding employee of Afrinic resigned soon after allegations emerged that millions of its valuable public-facing IPv4 addresses had been stolen and sold or leased to others through companies he controlled. Soon after, Afrinic's external auditor PwC informed the organization it, too, was resigning from its role.

In both cases, Afrinic's board has attempted to place itself above the issue by ordering an investigation and sending a letter to PwC asking for an explanation. But internet insiders say the rot goes far deeper, and note that warnings of unusual activity at Afrinic, including misdirected organizational funds, have long gone unanswered by a series of CEOs and boards, despite a series of "investigations." In an explosive article earlier this month, the lease and sale of allegedly stolen blocks of IP addresses going back years was traced directly to the organization's second employee, Ernest Byaruhanga, Afrinic's policy coordinator.

Oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Not like the US House of Representatives.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Uh, she did that yesterday.

Just copying ICANN most likely

[damn_registrars]

I struggle to name a more corrupt organization than ICANN; likely Afrinic was just copying from their playbook.

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[DNS-and-BIND]

Yes, David Duke, because Africans can only copy whites and can never have any ideas of their own.

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[damn_registrars]

That is a strange conclusion to draw from what I wrote. If organization A sees that organization B is making more money and they copy the strategies of organization B to increase their profitability that doesn't mean they are unoriginal or inferior, it just means they recognize when someone else came to a working solution before they came up with one of their own. In fact as corruption is only just starting to infiltrate Afrinic - while it has been rooted in ICANN for a long time now - I would argue that A

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[Brett Buck]

There are plenty of organizations far more corrupt than ICANN - The International Olympic Committee, FIFA, The United Nations, and the European Union, for example. And they hardly invented the concept.

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[damn_registrars]

Sure, corruption existed before ICANN (and it will exist after as well). But claiming that the UN is somehow more corrupt than ICANN is a stretch. Is the UN perfect? Certainly not, but it is vastly less corrupt than ICANN and arguably their corruption screws things up for fewer people than the corruption at ICANN. ICANN just gets less attention for their corruption, likely in part because it permeates so much of the group that it has nearly become their mantra, and also because few people are aware of w

Re:

[AHuxley]

Re "colonialism and legacy of slavery"... Africa has had a few generations of its own to get power, trains, ports, roads, gov, exports "working" without another nations direct support.

IP addresses are the new cryptocurrency

[xack]

Speculation is running out of control and underhanded methods of obtaining ip addresses to sell for profit are rising. Expect more of this and even see companies bought for their ip addresses like Microsoft did to Nortel. We will soon see a lot of ip jacking like sim jacking . ISPs and websites are making it worse by saying they have "no plans" and "no demand" for ipv6, even major sites like Github and Reddit.

My predictions stands

[DesScorp]

"Africa's Internet Management Body Mired Again by Corruption Allegations "

Between regional corruption, and states like China firewalling their country off from the rest of the world, the Internet will break up into interNets. China will have their own Internet, Russia will have their own, India will have their own, Arabs will have their own, Eastern and Western Europe will like have separate internets, etc. The Internet will break up into Superpower and Regional Internets, all firewalled off from each other for political and security reasons. And Crime. Russian ransomware isn't as dangerous if Russians can't reach your networks. Our children and grandchildren won't know what the truly global Internet was, except from stories from their grandparents. "Why, there was a time I could see websites in France! Imagine THAT, youngin'!". In China, they won't even have this, as the ChiComs will simply memory hole the fact that a global Internet ever existed, Orwell-style. Everything will be rewritten so that Internet technology was created in China, and those sneaky Gwai-Lo's stole it from them, so the wise, benevolent Communist Party had to create a Great Firewall to protect them. And they'll believe every word (see: the Tienanmen aftermath).

And Africanet, or whatever it will be called, will barely function and be run like, well, an African country. Just as Afrinic is now.

In the end, a truly free global Internet without mass crime, fraud, and government control (not to mention government AND corporate snooping) was too much to ask for. That brief, blissful birth of the web from the mid 90-s to mid-oughts will be remembered as a legendary time.

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[rtb61]

Africa is not a pattern for the rest of the world. Lower intellectual standing, driven by millennia of phsyical state of mental state, have created a population distortion, that is not capable of reasonably understanding the real ramifications of mass corruption. As such, African economies are highly corruptible and the model going forward, well likely be foreign corporations, running African corporations by remote control to extract as much profit as possible, as fast as possible, with total disregard for

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[arglebargle_xiv]

It's not just economies, corruption and nepotism are everywhere. Your loyalty is to your family members, then to your tribe/ethnic group, and then it ends. Unless you've lived there it's hard to understand just how dysfunctional everything is, or at least that things work but nothing like how they work everywhere else. In fact when I saw the headline I was tempted to respond with the standard "Welcome to Africa!" that's used whenever people with no experience of how things work there expresses shock at s

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[bn-7bc]

the way to solve corroption related to ipv4 adrersses, get IPv9 deployed now when the need for IPv4 addresses shrink )when we finally can deploy new services on Ipv6 only without loosing a significant amount of potential customers) the iIPv4 transfer marcket will just evaporate

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Hmm, not sure about that one. You ever seen an angry Tswana mother go at her adult son who's twice her size? You ignore your family at your peril.