it's all this guy: https://heng.lu/

who is very outspoken against IPv6 adoption because he wants to capitalize on his v4 holdings. THE END.

I don't know if I've heard a sentence from him that isn't a threat of legal action for something

But he earned those addresses by the sweat of his brow! He's entitled to whatever the market will bear and more, because numbers aren't free!

I don't know who that guy is, but if he's against IPv6, why does he say;

>promotes accountable leadership, fair market practices, and adoption of the next generation of IPv6 addresses.

I learned about him yesterday via this article. It also frames into context articles I've seen in the past about AFRINIC's IPv4 space being lost to foreigners. https://medium.com/@emmanuelvitus/afrinic-hope-hijack-and-th...

A couple months ago he gave a talk Why Buying IP Addresses is a Scam in Washington DC. It's a lot of complaining about who owns IP addresses: https://youtu.be/dAqXo5DB42E?si=7RpoUFXM3KXziN-Y

It appears the entire channel and Number Resource Society is just a front for his own opinions: https://m.youtube.com/@numberresourcesociety

How does his YouTube channel have:

1) 6.3M subscribers

2) <5k views on about half their videos

3) 10M+ views on a random selection of their dullest videos?

YouTube is willingly complicit in bot activity when it makes their stats look good. They don’t care about bot subscribers or comments as long as it drives engagement

And their Facebook/Twitter accounts have no meaningful engagement at all. 123 followers on Twitter, which is pathetic. Even I managed to get ~600 followers, mostly from when my blog ended up on the HN frontpage. I barely posted on Twitter. It's a massive discrepancy from their 6.3 million YouTube subscribers. Together with the view count rollercoaster, this does not smell kosher.

So it seems that a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck is engaging in bad faith bullshit behaviour on account of being a bad faith bullshitter who will abuse any system to bits to earn a buck. I am shocked I tell you. Shocked!

Why is NK called Democratic People's Republic if it's not? The marketing copy can say whatever it needs to.

And America isn't a democracy, it's a Republic.

When the Presided of the USA is no longer bound by the Constitution, written law, it is no longer.

Funnily enough, it isn't even a constitutional monarchy then, it regresses beyond that to an absolute monarchy.

The fact remains the country, as defined by its laws, should be a democracy.

Its people will have a lot of stuff to fix in a couple years.

This is the most infuriatingly incorrect statement.

America is a democracy AND it's a republic AND a bunch of other stuff.

The full description is that America is a Federal Constitutional Representative Democratic Republic.

Technically “America” is a continent. The country is called “United States of America”. ;-)

And yes, saying it’s not a democracy infuriates me as well, because it’s being used to justify a whole lot of undemocratic shenanigans.

Lol I almost went for that pedantry. However technically America is not a continent (under most definitions of continent) but North and South America are. :P

Unless you grew up in a place that taught a six-continent model instead of a seven-continent model and it was NA/SA consolidated instead of Europe and Asia into Eurasia.

Also: continents are bullshit.

Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.

I don't hear it being called "America" here in Ireland. The only place I hear it is in the US, which is how I call it.

If somebody says "America" to you in Ireland, are you confused about what they are talking about? That's the difference.

I’ll immediately know I’m talking to someone from the US. It’s a bit like someone saying the hood of a car and we understanding they are referring to the bonnet. We don’t call it “hood” here, or, I suspect, anywhere else in the English speaking world.

> We don’t call it “hood” here, or, I suspect, anywhere else in the English speaking world.

Canadians use "hood", or at least I've never heard one refer to the "bonnet" of their car, although apparently "bonnet" is supposedly still used in Newfoundland.

I would expect Canadian English and American English would share more words than American English has with their European counterparts.

> Also also: America is the United States of America in the English-speaking world.

As an Australian English speaker, I will normally call it “the US”-the only time I ever call it “America” is when speaking to our 7 year old, because I know she knows what “America” means but I worry “the US” might confuse her; but with older children (such as our 12 year old) and with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me. In everyday speech, “the US” is (in my experience) more common than “America”, although both are understood as referring to the country; for the continent I use the plural (“the Americas”) to avoid the risk of confusion.

Using "United States" or "the US" is fine, but where "America" is used in the English-speaking world it still predominantly refers to the United States of America; but Australia is a big country. Given a large enough population of individualistic people—and there are a lot of individualistic English-speakers on Earth whether people such as yourself who share your particular hang-up or just contrarians—exceptions are not notable.

You are suggesting that preferring “the US” to “America” is due to myself being “contrarian” or “individualistic”, but I don’t agree-I’m not just describing my own personal usage, I’m describing my experience of the usage of other people around me-which assuredly is not an unbiased random sample of the general population-I think “the US” is preferred in more formal registers, and coming from a tertiary-educated upper middle class professional background, such people naturally tend to have a greater preference for more formal terms (even in informal contexts) than people at the other end of the educational/socioeconomic spectrum do-so it is understandable why I might hear “the US” more often than “America”, but people inhabiting different social contexts it would likely be the inverse

> I will normally call it “the US”-the only time I ever call it “America” is when speaking to our 7 year old, because I know she knows what “America” means but I worry “the US” might confuse her; but with older children (such as our 12 year old) and with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me.

It’s not wrong nor incorrect to call this an individualistic choice, and I mean, I’ve always perceived Australians as fairly individualistic people, but perhaps you feel differently? I’ll defer to you if that’s the case, it’s not a point I wanted to argue about, nor is it intended to be derogatory or disrespectful.

You are going out of your way to refer to America differently in different contexts though, and claiming that one variation feels incorrect. I stopped short of calling you specifically a contrarian because you didn’t express yourself like one, but that’s still a personal hang-up. It might be a shared personal hang-up with some of your cohorts, but it’s not one that any other Australian has ever confided in me, especially unprompted, and I don’t go around prompting people for terminological preferences on this subject. Most Australians I know or have known just call America “America” unless it’s like, the news.

> unless it’s like, the news

Yes, but that’s part of the point: in the most formal registers, “America” is incorrect-if you’re a lawyer drafting a legal contract, or an academic writing an article for a peer-reviewed journal on international relations, you’d be much more likely to write “the United States” (or “the US” for short) than “America”-and if despite that you wrote the second rather than the first, it is likely someone else would “correct” it in the editorial process

So there is a very real sense in which “the United States” is more formally correct than “America”. But it is of course context-dependent: using the most formally correct term is likely pragmatically incorrect if your audience is a classroom of average seven year olds

Also, formality of speech isn’t just determined by context (a legal contract or a peer-reviewed article versus speaking to a primary school class)-it is also determined by the background of the speaker (and audience)-people who come from more educated/professional/higher SES backgrounds tend to speak more formally even when speaking informally; the same is true of higher IQ people and higher AQ people (AQ=autism quotient, measuring autistic traits)

I understood you the first time, mate, and I've been very patient with your exceptional disposition on this subject.

That said, your personal choice in vernacular doesn't really override that when someone refers to America in the English-speaking world, that refers to the United States of America. It might be different in say, the Portuguese-speaking part of the world, but that's not really my business.

I think we’ve been talking past each other here - because you are talking about receptive language (understanding what other people say), and on that topic I said at the start the same thing as you are saying now - whereas I’ve been talking about expressive language (what you choose to say). A lot of words/phrases/usages a person might view as formally incorrect (or at least deprecated) but nonetheless have no trouble understanding what is intended when someone else says them.

While we (outside the US) use “American” to refer to something or someone who comes from the US, AFAIK, only Americans call the US “America”. And even on the “American” part, more specific language, such as “US-based”, “US-resident”, is often used.

You are right but it is more complex than that… e.g. as I mentioned earlier, (as an Australian) I will usually say “the US” not “America”, but in certain contexts - talking to younger children for example - it will be the other way around

> with adults I say “the US”, because calling it “America” feels incorrect to me

Sure. But if someone says America, you aren’t confused unless for performative purposes.

Yes, which is exactly what I already said in the comment you were responding to: “although both are understood as referring to the country”

America would then be the whole land mass. Or something like that.

No a Federal Constitutional Republic captures it perfectly. We are not a Democracy.

Oh my god I cannot stand reading this anymore, why do so many people parrot that like it's some gotcha phrase.

"A cat is not a pet, it's a feline."

Things can be multiple things at once. The US are a republic and a democracy. Republic = not a kingdom, democracy = power to the people. Close but not exact synonyms.

That site is unintentionally hilarious. Who knew that selling IP addresses was really an agent for the vague notion of social change lol.

Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517053 and https://techdirt.com/2025/07/09/litigious-company-demands-re... I now know what The Register was being so surprisingly careful about.

I was surprised the Register didn't provide the additional context of AFRINIC's revocation of Cloud Innovations IP4 blocks that were being sold anywhere but Africa[1][2][3].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43753738

2. Now-deleted report on involved parties by South African news org https://archive.is/bcSDY

3. https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/172579/cloud-innovations-i...

FYI The Reg has covered the back story - https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/03/nrs_afrinic_review/ - but suffice to say anything written about Cloud Innovation quickly attracts the attention of its lawyers. But evidence is being collected and the full story will one day be told.

Who are cloud innovation's IP address range customers?

Other articles suggest data centers outside of Africa

Is that legal?

Some corrupt employee sold millions of IPs to this guy and he's been reselling them outside of Africa .

Is that covered by any actual law? Is some government entity responsible? Or is it just an anarchy breaking down?

No one wants to get a sovereign country involved in these issues if they can avoid it, because that is an even more giant can of worms. Because then it’s ’whose laws again?’.

And all these matters cross every international boundary as a matter of course.

Unfortunately, it is also enabling this particular situation.

Ah. It sounds like another case where the Internet was built assuming a fair bit of goodwill on behalf of its users. Until we realized that it means that the worst 0.01% now have access to everyone in the world.

Though also, the alternatives are rarely much better.

Not that the rest of the world would be feeling great if this was all based out of Washington DC right now eh? Or Beijing. Or Paris. (Depending on who they are)

Its Africa

It's most likely against the IP allocation policy/agreement. Violating an agreement is a civil matter.

However, purposefully entering agreements with intent to violate them can escalate to criminal fraud, amd wire fraud when money is involved. There'a certainly a question of jurisdiction when there's so many localities involved.

Cloud Innovation primarily leases their AFRINIC-allocated IPv4 addresses to entities outside Africa, including datacenters and hosting companies in Asia and Europe, which is precisely what sparked the original legal disputes with AFRINIC over resource utilization policies.

Dubious/bulletproof hosting companies

As someone entirely unfamiliar with everything here: can ICANN actually do anything to resolve this situation, and I imagine, ideally retrieve the IPs from this unsavoury individual?

It’s in the article

> ICANN’s letter references a policy [PDF] that allows it to appoint an emergency replacement for a dysfunctional RIR, and states that ICANN reserves all rights to start the process that would make that possible.

I'm interested why Cloud Innovation say that this is also their preferred ending [0]. A double-bluff?

[0]: https://cloudinnovation.org/cloudinnovation-call-AFRINIC-win...

It could be a bet that Cloud Innovation would fare better under an ICANN takeover vs AFRNIC re-establishing control? From some articles I have read, the providence of how Cloud Innovation got their IP blocks is either lost or unknown, so maybe they are betting that if ICANN took over they would not touch Cloud Innovation blocks as the windup of AFRINIC would cause records to be lost?

Or it could be a bet that AFRINIC will eventually re-assert control, so the best thing you can do is try to muddy the waters and raise questions about AFRINICs legitimately which will add more procedural muck and further delay control.

AFRINIC is an utterly incompetent organisation and should be disbanded. Its resources should be managed by one of the other RIRs.

Well, that was the case before 2004.

I’ve posted about this saga on LinkedIn a bunch of times and received a cease and desist every time. These people are rent seeking fools who are holding African addresses hostage for profit.

More context: https://medium.com/@emmanuelvitus/afrinic-hope-hijack-and-th...

The only long term solution is to ban ipv4 sales and tell anyone who wants new ip addresses to get ipv6.

IPv4 is a security risk now with all sorts of malicious traffic routed through cgnat proxies.