The Battle Over Africa's Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses (msn.com) 55
In his mid-20s, Lu Heng "got an idea that has made him a lot richer," writes the Wall Street Journal.
He scooped up 10 million unused IP addresses, mostly form Africa, and then leases them to companies, mostly outside Africa, "that need them badly." [A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex and many older devices still need IPv4. Companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Google still want IPv4 addresses because their cloud-hosting businesses need them as bridges between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds... Africa, which has been slower to develop internet infrastructure than the rest of the world, is the only region that still has some of the older addresses to dole out... He searches for IPv4 addresses that aren't being used — by ISPs or anyone else that holds them — and uses his Hong Kong-based company, Larus, to lease them out to others.
In 2013, Lu registered a new company in the Seychelles, an African archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to apply for IP addresses from Africa's internet registry, called the African Network Information Centre, or Afrinic. Between 2013 and 2016, Afrinic granted that company, Cloud Innovation, 6.2 million IPv4 addresses. That's more addresses than are assigned to Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. A single IPv4 address can be worth about $50 on its transfer to a company like Larus, which leases it onward for around 5% to 10% of that value annually. Larus and its affiliate companies, Lu said, control just over 10 million IPv4 addresses. The architects of the internet don't appear to have contemplated the possibility that anyone would seek to monetize IP addresses...
Lu's activities triggered a showdown with Africa's internet registry. In 2020, after what it said was an internal review, Afrinic sent letters to Lu and others seeking to reclaim the IP addresses they held. In Lu's case, Afrinic said he shouldn't be using the addresses outside Africa. Lu responded that he wasn't violating rules in place when he got the addresses... After some back-and-forth, Lu sued Afrinic in Mauritius to keep his allocated addresses, eventually filing dozens of lawsuits... One of the lawsuits that Lu filed in Mauritius prompted a court there to freeze Afrinic's bank accounts in July 2021, effectively paralyzing the organization and eventually sending it into receivership. The receivership choked off distributions of new IPv4 addresses, leaving the continent's service providers struggling to expand capacity...
In September, Afrinic elected a new board. Since then, some internet-service providers have been granted IPv4 addresses.
He scooped up 10 million unused IP addresses, mostly form Africa, and then leases them to companies, mostly outside Africa, "that need them badly." [A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex and many older devices still need IPv4. Companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Google still want IPv4 addresses because their cloud-hosting businesses need them as bridges between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds... Africa, which has been slower to develop internet infrastructure than the rest of the world, is the only region that still has some of the older addresses to dole out... He searches for IPv4 addresses that aren't being used — by ISPs or anyone else that holds them — and uses his Hong Kong-based company, Larus, to lease them out to others.
In 2013, Lu registered a new company in the Seychelles, an African archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to apply for IP addresses from Africa's internet registry, called the African Network Information Centre, or Afrinic. Between 2013 and 2016, Afrinic granted that company, Cloud Innovation, 6.2 million IPv4 addresses. That's more addresses than are assigned to Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. A single IPv4 address can be worth about $50 on its transfer to a company like Larus, which leases it onward for around 5% to 10% of that value annually. Larus and its affiliate companies, Lu said, control just over 10 million IPv4 addresses. The architects of the internet don't appear to have contemplated the possibility that anyone would seek to monetize IP addresses...
Lu's activities triggered a showdown with Africa's internet registry. In 2020, after what it said was an internal review, Afrinic sent letters to Lu and others seeking to reclaim the IP addresses they held. In Lu's case, Afrinic said he shouldn't be using the addresses outside Africa. Lu responded that he wasn't violating rules in place when he got the addresses... After some back-and-forth, Lu sued Afrinic in Mauritius to keep his allocated addresses, eventually filing dozens of lawsuits... One of the lawsuits that Lu filed in Mauritius prompted a court there to freeze Afrinic's bank accounts in July 2021, effectively paralyzing the organization and eventually sending it into receivership. The receivership choked off distributions of new IPv4 addresses, leaving the continent's service providers struggling to expand capacity...
In September, Afrinic elected a new board. Since then, some internet-service providers have been granted IPv4 addresses.
Corruption (Score:3)
Where there's money to be made from a finite resource, there's corruption.
Re:Corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
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>Where there's Africa, there's corruption.
Where there are people, there is corruption.
There, fixed that for you.
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He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.
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He's probably like one of those people who knows that Africa has been fucked over by other nations as long as there have been other nations to fuck them over. Everyone's had a turn abusing Africa.
That not even close to true, that Africa is somehow more a "victim" than anywhere else.
It is a rationalisation, or as the kids say these days, "cope", where observed reality does not match up with ideology.
Like anywhere else in the world, historically most of the "fucking over" was by your own rulers and neighbours, not distant nations until very recently.
Sure, living on the coast might get you raided by Arabs in East Africa, or Viking in Europe. But perhaps the most unique aspect of sub-Saharan Africa's
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Sure, living on the coast might get you raided by Arabs in East Africa, or Viking in Europe.
How have you gone this long without ever once hearing of Rome?
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I'll add to that Africa's geography is fucked... the coastline is old, smooth, and shallow which means you don't get many ports. On top of that, the African escarpment means that interior rivers tend to have huge rapids that are basically unnavigable. All of this greatly complicates logistics and hampers internal trade... for instance, getting minerals from the east Congo to the Atlantic requires ~9 different transports (e.g., switching back and forth between water and land vehicles). Europe and North Ameri
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No, just one of the people who reflect that all people can do crime when you hear a black person shot someone.
In 2025 it's hard to consider Africa more corrupt than the USA.
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In 2025 it's hard to consider Africa more corrupt than the USA.
Ha, I guess it you've never been there! The corruption is endemic at every level, not just the presidential palace.
But I take your point. Trevor Noah was comparing Trump to an African dictator seven years ago.
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Yeah to be clear South Africa isn't the place that changed and in no way was I saying that South Africa isn't corrupt.
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In this case, the East did the plundering.
Re:The West has plundered everything else (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I think this is interesting, because the free market makes amazing things happen, wonders that no centrally planned economy could dream of. But we wish people wouldn't engage in exploitative trade--like when Russia privatized USSR/state owned assets, good people would wish ordinary people would have invested in them instead of gangsters with an eye toward a long investment. (Plus a couple Western hedge funds.) This is one reason why people say Russia's elite is literally criminals, not figuratively--they were mobsters, then they became very rich investors by being positioned to buy assets for a song. (Imagine an oil refinery that was selling for much less than the value of its finished barrels, let alone its capacity to continue refining.)
But the alternative to freely selling assets is choosing who can buy them. That could be good in some cases, but it invites corruption. Economists would say auctioning assets ensures they are put to the best use they can be. But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.
The point of this all is to say there's no easy solution to deciding how trade/commerce is conducted, and it's interesting to see where it goes right and wrong. (And to anyone that thinks it would be best to simply disallow most international trade, I would recommend checking out some economics podcasts.)
Re:The West has plundered everything else (Score:5, Interesting)
The point of this all is to say there's no easy solution to deciding how trade/commerce is conducted, and it's interesting to see where it goes right and wrong. (And to anyone that thinks it would be best to simply disallow most international trade, I would recommend checking out some economics podcasts.)
There is a solution; turn the finite resource into an essentially infinite resource, which is what the move to IPv6 was supposed to do.
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Is there another distribution mechanism that puts assets to more productive use? I don't see how imperfection makes it less ideal, absent an alternative.
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Thanks for attributing it properly at least. This is just a lot of words that aren't adding significant insight.
Re: The West has plundered everything else (Score:1)
If prices aren't rational, how can you tell if your system that assumes they are is better than another system without using circular logic?
If Trump wins an auction because he gets a line of credit from Deutsche Bank who created the money for him specifically because they liked his charisma or something, how does that irrational allocation of resources result in the best use of the resource being auctioned?
Since ChatGPT wins stock market auctions, why don't you accept the value of its replies? Are you deval
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I'm sorry but I can't make heads or tails of that comment. I don't think we're on the same page. My claim was that if there's not a known strategy that's more effective than an auction at allocating resources (to create the most overall value), then although the claim I referenced may be too strong--"auctioning assets ensures they are put to the best use they can be"--it's still directionally correct.
Or to make this more concrete, can you think of a realistic way auctioning off a portion of the radio spectr
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The only thing "Russian" about the people that own Russia now is the country on their passports, which they probably don't use anyway because of the sanctions etc. from Ukraine and that many have citizenship in whichever country they have moved to. They sure as hell don't give a damn about the country, it's people, or anything else "Russia", besides their ability to keep extracting money and influence from it.
Of course, you could say th
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The East has been plundering in Africa for a while & won't be stopping any time soon
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So... (Score:3)
Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
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Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
I didn't do anything crazy like actually read the article, but I did go as far as to read the third sentence of the summary, which began like this:
[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex [...]
.... and that would seem to indicate that IPv6 is currently handling around half of Internet traffic.
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Question is, is it actually making it out on the Internet or just being used to tunnel IPv4 through it?
It's a serious question because LTE and 5G networks only handle IPv6 data - all data packets are IPv6. IPv4 traffic must be tunnelled through the mobile IPv6 network. (This is because obviously there are too many mobile devices). It's why CGNAT exists - to provide the IPv4 gateway to the Internet from the I
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
The "around half" figure comes from Google's stats [google.com]. These show which protocol people hit Google's front-end load balancers over, so yes it's making it out onto the Internet.
Note that this is actually measuring the percentage of clients that will talk to a v6-enabled server over v6, not the percentage of Internet traffic that's going over v6. That one is very hard to measure, since nobody can see all of it.
I don't have a source handy, but recent stats I've seen from dual-stack capable client ISPs have reported something like 70% of their traffic by volume going over v6 (which means it bypasses their CGNAT hardware, which is nice because that stuff ain't cheap). That's traffic from v6 clients to v6 servers, so not tunnelled v4 either.
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Tunneling or native? (Score:2)
Go dual stack, don't release IPv4 addresses (Score:2)
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Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
Adoption is well ahead of IPv5. IPv6 is an LTS version.
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Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
I'm holding out for "IP viii - The Revengening"
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Whatever happened to IPv6 ?
You don't need IPv6. You can just NAT the NAT and put NAT on top of that in the form of CG-NAT. Who needs end-to-end connectivity anyway. /s
What happened to IPv6? We did. The "experts" who decided to not push it because we didn't understand it, mistake NAT for a firewall and thing an IP address is a security risk, and bitch and moan because they think they need to remember a complex hexadecimal address (which is rubbish).
IPv6 status right now (Score:2)
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Anyone still using IPv4 (Score:2)
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Is the network equivalent of still using floppy disks and deserves to be ripped off. Don't say but my legacy devices as Windows NT from 30 years ago had an ipv6 driver.
I know, screw all those backwater companies that haven't made their sites available over IPv6, like, you know, amazon.com, github.com, and... slashdot.org.
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Most consumers today aren't using IPv4 by choice, but by necessity. Every OS out there supports IPv6, as does every router made in the last 10 years, and supports it pretty much automatically if it's available. The main reason they still use IPv4 is that their ISP hasn't deployed IPv6 support on their residential network, so IPv6 isn't available unless you're a techie and recognize the name Hurricane Electric. The next most common reason is that the site they're accessing only has IPv4 addresses assigned so
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Whois Lu Heng (Score:3)
“In June 2020, in an action unrelated to its discovery of its own staff making inappropriate IP address allocations, AFRINIC management wrote to an organization called Cloud Innovation to which it previously granted the rights to use more than seven million IPv4 addresses. Cloud Innovation's CEO is Lu Heng, who also leads a company that, in correspondence with The Register, the NRS identified as a member: Hong-Kong-based Larus Limited.”
"Seven million numbers leased at just $2/year can generate upwards of $14 million in revenue."
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“Cloud Innovation's website does not list its address. But AFRINIC's WhoIs service lists an entity using the same name at Suite 202, 2nd Floor; Eden Plaza, Eden Island; Po Box 1352; Mahe; Seychelles. That same address is used by Appleby Global Services. That's the law firm that was the unwitting source of a trove of leaked documents that led to publication of The Paradise Papers – a major investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that explored how giant corporations and wealthy individuals use offshore tax havens to legally minimize their taxes.”
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"Seven million numbers leased at just $2/year can generate upwards of $14 million in revenue."
Sure. But the cost of the addresses is what?
A single IPv4 address can be worth about $50 on its transfer to a company like Larus
So a 25 year ROI? I think these numbers are off.
Abuse (Score:3)
I agree with the registries that even if this is legal, it's an abuse of the process. Whatever country has jurisdiction over Afrinic (Mauritius?) should simply expropriate the IP addresses and give them back to Afrinic. It's not as though we don't have enormous legal precedent for expropriating property when it's in the public interest.
Other unused blocks (Score:2)
Aren't there companies - mostly USA - with multiple 8s, much more than they could ever use?
I can understand IBM and HP needing multiple 8s, but General Motors and others?
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Afrinic? That's a word that doesn't make sense. (Score:1)
Origins from Africa, should be worded,
"Africanic"
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