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Businesses The Internet

Africa Internet Riches Plundered, Contested by China Broker (sfgate.com) 55

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Outsiders have long profited from Africa's riches of gold, diamonds, and even people. Digital resources have proven no different. Millions of internet addresses assigned to Africa have been waylaid, some fraudulently, including through insider machinations linked to a former top employee of the nonprofit that assigns the continent's addresses. Instead of serving Africa's internet development, many have benefited spammers and scammers, while others satiate Chinese appetites for pornography and gambling. New leadership at the nonprofit, AFRINIC, is working to reclaim the lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the body's very existence. The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under contested circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. That's about 5% of the continent's total -- more than Kenya has.

The internet service providers and others to whom AFRINIC assigns IP address blocks aren't purchasing them. They pay membership fees to cover administrative costs that are intentionally kept low. That left lots of room, though, for graft. When AFRINIC revoked Lu's addresses, now worth about $150 million, he fought back. His lawyers in late July persuaded a judge in Mauritius, where AFRICNIC is based, to freeze its bank accounts. His company also filed a $80 million defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO. It's a shock to the global networking community, which has long considered the internet as technological scaffolding for advancing society. Some worry it could undermine the entire numerical address system that makes the internet work.
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Africa Internet Riches Plundered, Contested by China Broker More

Africa Internet Riches Plundered, Contested by China Broker

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  • IPv4 addresses are a finite and dwindling resource and where there is scarcity, there will be speculation. Welcome to capitalism.
    • Jeez Slashdot, the solution is to rollout IPv6 globally, not mod-down those speaking the truth. We don't have enough IPv4 addresses so we made IPv6 (and fixed a lot more too). Roll it out.

      • Nope. I'm going to wait for IPv8. You'd think IPv6 will last an incredibly long time, but about 3.4x10E38 addresses won't last that long when IoT finally catches on!

        "Filter error: Looks like ascii art."
        No, stupid Slashdot. This is just a big-ass number that I had to replace with "3.4x10E38" because you still can't display unicode in 2021.

      • This site doesn't even handle unicode forms in HTML Anyone still around is probably a caveman (or caveperson) and doesn't care too much about IPv6. We probably have the highest number of people still using PPP to access a website.

        • We probably have the highest number of people still using PPP to access a website.

          Funds ran out. Got a pink SLIP to show for it.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by sabri ( 584428 )

          We probably have the highest number of people still using PPP to access a website.

          Actually, PPPoE and PPPoA are still very popular access methods.

          • well PPP != PPPoE. Although you can use Radius with either. It's been well over a decade before I last did anything with ADSL/ATM, I think I created my /. account around when I was working on DSL firmware (both ADSL and SDSL). All of this is old shit.

    • IPv4 addresses are a finite and dwindling resource

      That's absolute horseshit. Millions of routers sold around the world happily share the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. And when that one runs out, there's 192.168.1.x, 192.168.2.x, etc... And when we run out of THOSE, there are millions of addresses left in 127.0.0.0/8.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        IPv4 addresses are a finite and dwindling resource

        That's absolute horseshit. Millions of routers sold around the world happily share the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. And when that one runs out, there's 192.168.1.x, 192.168.2.x, etc... And when we run out of THOSE, there are millions of addresses left in 127.0.0.0/8.

        127.0.0.0/8, the Dogecoin of IPv4 speculation.

        • Negative (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I own 127/8. I have the NFT to prove it. My lawyers are coming after you. BE AFRAID motherfuckers.

      • > Millions of routers sold around the world happily share the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet. And when that one runs out, there's 192.168.1.x, 192.168.2.x, etc...

        Just stay out of my 10.x.y.z

      • "Millions of routers sold around the world happily share the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet"

        They don't share anything. Every one of them is deluded, but that delusion ends at the frontier of the public Internet.

    • That’s more reality than Capitalism, economic systems only exist because resources are scarce. There has yet to be one that prevented corruption, which seems to be the allegation here.
  • i.e. the way business operates in places with no effective or fair legal system.

  • Ban IPv4 ASAP .. I donâ(TM)t care how it is done. IANA needs to declare IPv4 obsolete and then the CDC/FDA must declare it a health hazard and provide emergency approval of IPv6. Following that all routers on the internet should no longer recognize IPv4 and everyone on the public Internet should be mandated to use IPv6 unless they wish to be isolated within their home network.

    • It's a lot easier to let the market decide. If the cost of IPv4 addresses goes up, then that's a great incentive for IPv6 deployment. It has already made cellphone providers move to IPv6 on cost grounds. Content sites like Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, etc. all have IPv6.

      Given that a good proportion of Slashdot's readers are on mobile devices, and a big majority of those devices can use either native IPv6 or clunky CGNAT IPv4, it would make a lot of sense for Slashdot to dual home as IPv4/IPv6.

      • Cell providers have mostly moved to CGNAT because it's cheaper than IPv6. What cell company went IPv6?

        • Typically cellphones on a cell company that is IPv6-enabled would go to an IPv4 site like Slashdot using NAT, and to Facebook/Google/Netflix/Wikipedia using native IPv6. For IPv6, Akamai's IPv6 stats page [akamai.com] has cell companies including Reliance-Jio 88%, Bharti 56%, T-Mobile 88%, and Vodafone India 68%. I believe Verizon Wireless is IPv6-enabled, but that could be rolled up in the 42% figure for Verizon Business. If Verizon FIOS is included in that figure it is part of the non-IPv6 58% :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skapare ( 16644 )

      just have browsers try IPv6 addresses a couple times first and fall back to IPv4 addresses if there is no connection within 10 seconds. that will encourage more sites to get their IPv6 going.

  • Should be good for Africa (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Thursday October 07, 2021 @02:16PM (#61869741)
    Africa was the last region in the world which had a sizeable chunk of IPv4 addresses left. All other regional registries have run out of IPv4 addresses to assign years ago, except for tiny amounts which are assigned to new ISPs under strict rationing rules to give them access to the IPv4 internet through CGNAT and for infrastructure purposes. If African ISPs wern't under the same pressure as everybody else to move to IPv6, their "advantage" would likely have led them to build a network of the past. The IPv4 internet has no future. That said, China isn't even really on the internet, with their users barricaded off behind the Great Chinese Firewall, so it shouldn't hoard addresses, neither from their own regional registry, APNIC, nor from AFRINIC.
    • But it's not China. It's a businessman from Hong Kong.

      My how the rhetoric changes from free Hong Kong to "you are China". As if there's any doubts about whether support for Hong Kong was ever real.
  • The officials that sold the IP addresses had the right to sell them. Where they corrupt - yes, did Li know they were corrupt - yes. But that isn't Li's problem. It is a problem of AFRINIC that allowed corrupt individuals the power to sell something of value and keep the profits. Be angry at AFRINIC, be angry at those who appointed people to AFRINIC but that's where it stops. It is not up to the buyer to determine how ethical the seller is.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )

      If Li knew they were corrupt, it is Li's problem. Receiving stolen goods is still a crime, the buck does not stop at the thief.

      • They were not stolen. The seller had the legitimate right to sell them. Most African governments have some level of corruption does that mean you can't do any business deals with African governments? Is there some threshold level of corruption that is allowed? What about dealing with the US government? US politicians regularly make decisions and votes on issues that would have them jailed in the rest of the western world for conflict of interest. My point is that you have to recognize that a governmen

  • This situation in Africa name buying scheme is no different. He bought fair and square naming rights.

  • Lu Heng instantly made me think of Rockefeller.
    The work conditions are about the same in China as they used to be in the US back then, as far as I can tell.
    China really the "perfect fusion" of pretend-communist dictatorship and hyper-capitalism. Worst of both words. May somebody have mercy on the people there. As the situation clearly shows there is no God to do that.

  • Seriously, this is BS. They own the IPv4s. Fine. AFRINC control those, not Lu Heng. All AFRINC needs to do is take those IPv4 out of usage, while giving Lu Heng a number of IPv6 addresses.

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