On 02/04/2012 15:39, Marco Schmidt wrote:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-01/

This proposal contains the following statement:

Hence there is a significant over-supply of IPv4 in North America versus the rest of the world. In a global economy, membership in any particular RIR should not be a barrier to acquiring IPv4 Addresses when the source is not within the same RIR region.

I'm not going to argue about the amount of address space allocated within continental north america, but just point out that a policy of this form will apply equally for exchanging address space in+out of the afrinic region - which has the least well developed internet infrastructure, the greatest deficit of ip addresses and the longest expected exhaustion time. If it happens that the net movement of IP address is out of the afrinic area and towards the rest of the world, then the infrastructural deficit in Africa will be even more disadvantaged than it currently is. Nick