On 17 Jun 2025, at 7:55, Andrew Alston wrote:
If you read the order that they cited from the 12th of September in it’s entirely the court already acknowledged that compliance with the bylaws wasn’t practical but directed the election to proceed irrespective of that.
i admit, it’s difficult to keep up with all the orders, so i will try to make time to read that. thanks.
Secondly - I keep hearing about these POAs - do we have numbers or evidence of these?
i think that it is an open secret that this was on offer. i don’t have numbers for you, and i don’t think you’ll find them, asking in this manner. i agree that it’s a ridiculous thing to do; but hey, every day, millions of people wilfully pay money, to pull poison into their lungs, so where’s the bar for insanity? :-)
numbers aside, surely there’s room for a disconnect in voting intent between proxies and POAs; and if that loophole (dreamt up or not) could be exploited, it would have been trivial for the electoral committee to enforce how that should have been addressed, right? but, they chose not to (the rumours of POAs being abused were abound, well before the elections were announced!) again, speaking only for myself, i think it’s the sum of all of these niggly bits that prompted the TISPA action.
Thirdly - while I agree the new member thing is problematic - I would like to know of the 2200+ members how many members we are talking about.
if you believe afrinic’s numbers, that’s potentially 194; of which 51 are from ZA (which makes it topical for discussion here) i went to https://stats.afrinic.net/member/ and put in an appropriate date-range and that’s what i got. i welcome better data.
(dear afrinic, please change the default setting to DDMMYYYY, since that’s really what most people in your service region use, and not MMDDYYYY)
The problem with the new members post September 2023 is that without a delegation of authority from the previous legitimate board, and in the absence of a chief executive officer, there is no one who could bind AfriNIC to a contractual relationship other than the recover himself. This calls into question the legal validity of any MSA signed post September 2023 unless it was signed by the OR.
so wait. i can take your money, and provide you with the services you’re paying for - since afrinic was allocating resources from (sep 2023 - dec 2024) or so, but i won’t give you the right to something enshrined in your bylaws. i’m not a “new” resource member that falls into that category, but i’m sure you agree that there’s some double standard here.
On a forth note - I honestly do believe that the procedure in place makes it harder - not easier - to rig the election,
yes, no debate here; i agree. notarisation is time-consuming, costly, increased the effort required to vote .. but, more secure! and here’s why this flummoxes me; notarisation was never required before, but someone in the election committee had the good sense to understand how/why this closed up one threat avenue. surely, with just a little bit of lateral thinking, they could have spotted some of the blatantly obvious issues?
what i don’t agree with, are the short timelines and poor and often confusing manner in which this process was communicated, especially given the newly introduced complexities. i think that, with minimal effort, this could have been much, much better. still, i think that this is not relevant to TISPA’s order, so while i am fine to share my ideas with afrinic on how to improve their messaging, this is not really up for debate here.
Finally - the functions of the nomcom as described in section 9.2 (I believe it’s 9.2 - don’t have the bylaws in front of me) have been fulfilled to the letter of the bylaws. I also note the bylaws explicitly say that the board of directors appoints the nomcom - we have no board - and that the chief executive officer appoints the election comm - we have no ceo and in his place we have a receiver, who has explicit authority to do this.
would you agree that something as simple as a written statement (from nomcom people) that the nomcom folks (or their respective organisations) did not provide legal advice to any company in active litigation with AFRINIC would be helpful to clear aspersion on said parties? again get the lawyers to wordsmith that, but surely this level of transparency is more important now, than ever?
again - i think that it’s : (a) important to have elections, but also (b) those elections should be fair, transparent and beyond reproach
before you say: “perfection is the enemy of complete”, the process as it was, was so far way from perfection, that i don’t decry TISPA’s emergency action. and, i think that a simple open, consultative process on how to address the shortcomings of “how to conduct an election given the constraints we have now” would have saved AFRINIC a lot of this trouble.
and so we are back to: “what is the best compromise between having an election as reasonably quickly as possible, and making sure that this is as free and fair as possible, and protects members’ rights?”. i think there’s room for that compromise, and what i expect the next step to be.
—n.