Senior ICANN participants, including chairman Vint Cerf, flagged up the expected approval yesterday at the opening day of ICANN’s 22nd general meeting, here in Mar Del Plata, Argentina.
The acceptance of AfriNIC as the fifth Regional Internet Registry has been expected for some time. Late last year, the group was accepted as a provisional member of the Number Resource Organization, which includes the other RIRs.
RIRs act as middlemen between ICANN and ISPs in their region, accepting blocks of IP address space from ICANN and handing smaller chunks over to ISPs, to ensure that IP addresses remain unique.
African nations have to date been managed by RIPE NCC, the European RIR. AfriNIC will be the second RIR that ICANN has approved, following the recognition of LACNIC, for the Latin America and Caribbean region, in 2002.
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