[address-policy-wg] IPv4 policy document and request forms updated

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Jeff Williams wrote:

       >   Thank you Jon for your explanation.  I now have the
       > understanding I thought I had but was taken back by ARIN having
       > one allocation policy for minimal allocations and AFriNIC having
       > another in that AFriNIC is in part somehow connected to both RIPE
       > and ARIN, so than AFriNIC elected to go with a lower allocation.  
       > Still one has to wonder as to why AFriNIC went that way as it in
       > some ways doesn't make good sense...  Perhaps that was due to
       > political pressure?

There was no politics involved. The community requested for this at the 
ISPA i-week meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa last year. Below is 
partly the text that was in that proposal:

  The economies of Africa and those of other countries in the ARIN
  region (United States and Canada) are not of the same scale. The
  number of Internet users inside Africa is much fewer than in the
  other countries in the ARIN region. Whereas it may be reasonable to
  expect that the user numbers in North America support an ISP's
  ability to meet the current ARIN IPv4 criteria, it is not reasonable
  in Africa. Unable to meet the current criteria to obtain IPv4 address
  space from ARIN, and unable to obtain adequate address space from
  upstream providers; African ISPs must resort to solutions such as
  NAT, or sometimes are simply not able to provide services to
  customers due to the lack of IPv4 address space. Lack of adequate
  IPv4 address space may be slowing down the growth and development of
  the Internet in Africa. 

regards,

Ernest.