There are two sides to every story… On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 at 09:44, Lu Heng <h.lu@anytimechinese.com <mailto:h.lu@anytimechinese.com>h <mailto:jcurran@arin.net>.lu@anytimechinese.com> wrote:
Dear John:
The statements you made are very misleading.
Here are some clarifications:
Cloud Innovation is disputing AFRINIC’s claim that Cloud Innovation is in breach of the agreement. Cloud Innovation maintains that we are a compliant member.
1. While I make no comment regarding the justification of our resources. we have rights just like any other registrant to keep our justification material confidential. We would like to share some public data here: Cloud innovation accounts for 80% of all AFRINIC whois updates in 2021 to date and in AFRINIC whois, over 10 million (roughly 10% of all AFRINIC space) IP addresses whois information has not been updated in more than 10 years. 40million (roughly 40%) IP addresses have not been updated in more than 5 years. Have all of them been required to provide re-justification while they don’t bother to update whois? 313 out of 1800 members have not made a single assignment in their allocations more than a year after receiving. 641 member registered show less than 50% utilization, while AFRINIC’s CPM 5.5.1.9 requires at least 50% utilization. All of those member are in violation, including several major telecoms. However according to one press we saw, AFRINIC only audited 15 member and terminated 5 of them, Cloud Innovation being the most compliant member in terms of whois update and utilization data provided to AFRINIC as data shows above.
2. I did go to ARIN for resource, ARIN requested customer personal information down to street names, personal address, all of which we do not collect in our business from end users due to data privacy concerns. I have mentioned in one of ARIN’s meeting and received a consistent answer that it must be provided before the resources can be allocated. While I later understood it is part of ARIN policy, I still believe that it is an unwise policy which puts ARIN in possession of a large collection of personally identifying information (PII). So abandoning our ARIN application for resources after RIPE ran out, was a legitimate business decision and IMHO, a morally correct one made in order to protect the privacy of our customer’s. John's statement is misleading at best. John himself has repeatedly stated that ARIN does not deny requests, but that applicant’s often abandon requests when they are unwilling or unable to provide the requested data. That’s exactly what happened here. Contrary to John’s claim, that ARIN refused the application in question, the actual facts of the matter are that Outside Heaven chose to abandon its request rather than compromise the confidentiality of its customers and trust ARIN with such a significant amount of customer PII.
4. Cloud Innovation's utilization is global, roughly 30% Asia and 30% US, with rest equally spread throughout Europe, AFRICA, and Latin America. There is nothing in AFRINIC policy manual which restricts usage of resource anywhere. And it is also common practice of several large US firms to use ARIN space either globally or across multiple regions at least.
5. Unless ARIN admits it has been given the justification submitted to AFRINIC by Cloud Innovation in past years, we don't think it is within ARIN’s mandate to comment whether it is being used for the same purpose or not. John, please clarify, have you received the justification material we submitted to AFRINIC? Do you have any inside knowledge about it? We would be very keen to know if AFRINIC has disclosed our private data to a third party in this process in violation of the very agreement they (unjustly) accuse us of breaching.
6. We find your discussion of the RIR stability fund most interesting… Please correct us if we misunderstand, but our understanding is that the fund requires the unanimous consent of all 5 RIR CEOs in order to be utilized. As such, it appears you are attempting to mislead the community by making a 20% promise as if it were a 100% assurance.
For the above reasons, we think that Mr. Curran has not provided a balanced or fully accurate representation of the facts to the ARIN community here and we hope that the above clarification will help members of the community come to a more fully informed opinion.
Finally, while we realize that this is inappropriate for PPML, as it does not really touch on any ARIN policy discussion, we believe that Mr. Curran’s post could not be allowed to stand without rebuttal. Since he chose to make such a non-policy post to PPML, we felt that our posting of the rebuttal here was justified.
Unless Mr. Curran or other ARIN staff member(s) choose to further engage on this topic here, this will be our only post on the matter to this list. We would also welcome the opportunity to take the discussion to a more appropriate ARIN list if Mr. Curran prefers that alternative.