John Levine wrote:
I would be astonished if ICANN had a position. For one thing, they
have no provision for dealing with competing IP registries since the
issue has never come up
As
ICP-2: Criteria for Establishment of New Regional
Internet Registries
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/new-rirs-criteria-2012-02-25-en
2) The new RIR must demonstrate that it has the broad
support of the LIRs (ISP community) in the proposed region
if overwhelming majority, which means there is no competition,
of LIRs in AfriNIC region request to abandon AfriNIC and to
have an alternate RIR, ICANN should honor the request.
For another, they are extremely allergic to
anything that might even possibly involve them in a lawsuit.
ICANN was established to protect governance structure (including
RIRs, of course) of the Internet free from government (especially
USG) interventions. As such, ICANN is expected to work to isolate
African RIR operations from existing lawsuit.
Masataka Ohta
