The Regional Internet Registry system’s openness defence asks a meeting invitation to do the work of a constitution. A small group makes decisions affecting networks across a region. Asked how that group acquired authority over the people outside, the answer is that those people could have come inside. The attendance list may be small; the implied constituency can cover a continent. An open door is supposed to settle the difference.

Behind community consensus are the people who actually take part. Chairs assess their agreement; institutions act on the resulting decisions. Yet the community is also invoked to mean operators and networks across a whole region. Agreement among those who participated is invoked as authority in the name of those who did not. Changing the meaning of a word has not appointed anyone to represent the people outside.^{3, 4}

An operator’s network already belongs to the wider Internet community invoked to justify the institution’s reach. No attendance history is required to count that operator among the people supposedly represented. Under rules requiring prior participation, that history becomes necessary when the operator seeks an office. Inclusion is immediate when it enlarges the claimed mandate; eligibility takes longer when it might change the leadership.^{3, 8, 23}

The next meeting may be open. Last year’s meetings are not available to a newcomer who needs them on an attendance record. Where candidacy requires several years of prior participation, today’s invitation arrives too late for the current selection. The promised route to change begins by requiring a past that the newcomer cannot acquire retrospectively. The practical instruction is to become one of us before becoming eligible to change who governs.^{8, 13, 23}

Openness Alibi names the use of an invitation to participate as a substitute for authorisation to govern. Community closure exposes the substitution: the institution narrows access to its power while retaining the breadth of the population in whose name that power is exercised.

During the 2020s, election and selection rules across RIPE and RIPE NCC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and AFRINIC made that answer harder to sustain. Prior attendance became a qualification. Subscription history became a waiting period. Institutional examinations and screening determined whose name could reach a ballot. In some processes, the existing leadership acquired an explicit role in deciding which prospective successors were admissible. The documentary record runs across all five regions.^{5, 7, 8, 16, 17, 19, 23}

Running-Code Betrayal identified the inversion of the service relationship: institutions created to coordinate functioning networks began placing institutional decisions above those networks. Mandate Laundering identified the conversion of that administrative role into a claim of wider authority. Openness Alibi examines the defence that holds the two together, and what happens when the institutions themselves withdraw its premise.^{1, 2}

The Authority That Authorised Itself

A registry needs a reliable way to preserve number uniqueness and maintain accurate records. Neither function creates a representative assembly for a continent. An operator’s dependence on a common record does not appoint the recordkeeper to determine the limits of the operator’s freedom.

In this argument, the community authorises the institution. The institution’s procedures determine which participants count for the relevant decision. When the scope of institutional authority is challenged, that same community is asked to settle the question. The process supplies both the claim to power and the test of whether that power has gone too far. The missing authorisation has not been found. It has been passed around the table.^{2, 3}

The openness argument was meant to supply the missing connection to the outside world. In the April 2026 CircleID discussion of Running-Code Betrayal, ARIN President and CEO John Curran gave it a particularly clear formulation: “Openness provides legitimacy; participation determines outcomes.” He also argued that the community could determine whether the RIR system had exceeded its mandate. A small participating group, in this account, could be changed through “only modest additional engagement” from operators.⁴

Taken seriously, this reasoning would let any private association announce an open meeting and treat everyone who stayed away as part of the constituency governed by its attendees. Nonattendance would become the public’s fault; governing authority would become the meeting’s reward. Publishing the invitation would do the work of obtaining consent.

The people who decline an invitation have not appointed the people who accept it. A public meeting can make its decisions visible. It cannot manufacture the authorisation to impose them on everybody else. The emperor’s new clothes are the words community-driven and community consensus. Beneath them lies an attendance list, with no delegation from the people outside it.

The Record Across Five Regions

RIPE and RIPE NCC

The RIPE NCC’s Executive Board elections acquired a new screening layer in 2021. The announcement of 10 March introduced a candidate Code of Conduct, a designated team to assess violations, certified identity documents and signed declarations. Candidates could be disqualified. The sitting Executive Board appointed the first enforcement team. The members’ eventual choice operated within a candidate field subject to those institutional decisions.⁵

RIPE’s community working groups provide a separate record. In September 2025, the Open Source Working Group’s call for chair candidates specified previous attendance at multiple physical RIPE meetings and interviews by the existing chairs. It stated: “The ultimate decision is taken by the remaining WG chairs.” On 20 September, the group announced that no nominations had been received and all three incumbents would continue.⁶

On 7 August 2026, the working group adopted a formal procedure incorporating attendance requirements previously expressed in candidate calls. A candidate must have attended more than one RIPE Meeting in person. The remaining chairs assess support; the working group gives final approval; the RIPE Chair Team oversees the process and decides when the preferred candidate cannot be clearly determined. An engineer may build the software those networks run and still lack the required visits to the room.⁷

APNIC

On 14 September 2023, APNIC members approved changes to its Executive Council election rules, to be used from the 2024 election. Candidates had to have attended at least three of the previous seven APNIC conferences, in person or online, as well as the meeting at which the election would take place. The reforms also created an Electoral Committee, appointed by the existing Executive Council, with powers to determine eligibility and exclude candidates.^{8, 9}

Another amendment excluded individuals involved in current litigation against APNIC, extending the exclusion to directors, controlling shareholders and employees of a litigating organisation or its related companies. Proceedings initiated by APNIC were excepted. A person could challenge the institution in court and thereby become ineligible to stand for its Executive Council. A route to external accountability had been made a barrier to internal office. The provision remains in APNIC’s published bylaws.^{8, 10}

APNIC’s 2023 Special Interest Group election changes addressed another entrance. Under the earlier rules, a registered participant with the required previous conference attendance could vote online. The revised attendee route required presence at the current conference in person. A separate vote was added for each member organisation. Online-only nonmember participants lost their route into the electorate, while an institutionally defined membership channel gained one.^{11, 12}

LACNIC

On 19 December 2022, LACNIC implemented LAC-2022-4. Previously, any subscriber to its public Policy List could vote in PDP chair elections. The new rule required six months’ subscription before the election announcement to vote and twelve months to stand as a candidate. The distinction between an interested participant and an eligible participant was now measured in elapsed institutional time.¹³

The following year, LACNIC introduced competency assessment into its Board election process. At the NRO Executive Council meeting on 19 September 2023, LACNIC reported that the mechanism had “reduced the typical 15 candidates to 4”. Candidate filtering was being reported as an institutional result.^{14, 15}

The regulations approved on 6 August 2024 make the mechanism concrete. Board candidates must score at least 70 per cent in an examination covering prescribed competencies. A pass lasts eighteen months; attempts are limited to once per semester. The Board defines the regulations and may revise them. A candidate who has not passed before nominations close cannot stand. The power to elect directors is exercised only after the institution has certified the available choices.¹⁶

ARIN

ARIN’s changes reached both candidacy and the electorate. In May 2022, it changed the petition route for Board and Advisory Council candidates. A route previously open to anyone became reserved for nominees who had already entered the nomination process and been classified as unable to qualify. Independent entry by member petition became a route for challenging an institutional screening result.¹⁷

In 2022, the NRO Number Council election still included eligible meeting attendees outside the General Member voting channel; the published result records 131 attendee ballots. In April 2024, ARIN announced that the NRO NC election would instead be restricted to General Members. Its presentation stated: “There’s no longer any voting outside of ARIN General Membership.”^{18, 19}

Continued voting status also became conditional on past participation. The membership structure announced in December 2021 provided that, after the 2023 election and subsequent elections, General Members who had not cast a ballot in any of the previous three elections would revert to Service Member status. On 9 November 2026, ARIN reclassified another 369 organisations on that basis. They retained registry services but lost voting eligibility and had to request General Membership again. The organisation remained inside the system being administered while being moved outside its voting class. Dependence survived more easily than the franchise.^{20, 21}

AFRINIC

In August 2020, AFRINIC explicitly linked increased subscriptions to its Resource Policy Discussion mailing list with restrictions on voting. Following an increase in July subscriptions, it announced a six-month subscription requirement for the forthcoming online elections. New participation became the occasion for limiting the influence of new participants.²²

The published 2026 guidelines require PDP co-chair candidates to have three aggregate years of meaningful policy-list activity, participation in two AFRINIC events within five years, including webinars, and nominations from two distinct resource members. Registered Public Policy Meeting participants may take part in the selection; the longer institutional history is required of those seeking office. A proposal submitted on 7 October 2026, still under discussion, would require chair candidates to have attended four of the previous six Public Policy Meetings.^{23, 24}

On 9 November 2026, AFRINIC announced one valid nomination for the co-chair selection scheduled for 18 November: Sylvain Baya. The community was invited to participate in selecting from a list of one.²⁵

Attendance Cannot Become Jurisdiction

The offices described above have different functions. Boards govern organisations. Policy chairs administer deliberation. Working group chairs organise particular areas of work. NRO Number Council representatives occupy another part of the coordination structure. Across those layers, access to institutional office is being conditioned on qualifications defined within the structure itself.

Three conferences establish attendance at three conferences. Seventy per cent in an examination records a result against a syllabus. Neither is a delegation from a network operator outside the process. The institution has become increasingly exact about the credentials of prospective officeholders while leaving the credentials of its claimed authority to the word community.^{8, 16}

An internal election determines who occupies an office. It does not establish how far the office’s power may reach. The Multi-Stakeholder Mirage identified precisely this conversion of attendance into mandate.³

Forced Representation examined how an institution could invoke an inclusive community while treating an inconvenient participant as an outsider. Note 76 examined administrators’ control over the recognition of those entitled to challenge them. The wider election record shows how those boundaries become durable: through written qualifications, controlled admission and the certification of eligible choices.^{27, 28}

The bookkeeper auditioning for Olympus has acquired an admissions office. The office decides who may enter the ceremony; it cannot supply the authority missing from the throne.²⁹

What Remains After the Alibi

An operator can enter a public discussion, comment on the rules and watch a leadership contest for which that operator is ineligible to stand. The ability to comment does not confer eligibility to stand. The door to discussion is being made to stand for every door behind it.

The historical significance of community closure is the separation it makes visible. The community invoked to justify the institution remains expansive. The community allowed to contest its leadership is narrower, qualified and screened. The institution continues borrowing legitimacy from the former while allocating power through the latter.

Once that substitution is exposed, the openness defence has nothing left to contribute to the missing mandate. What remains is the registry’s operational position: its records, its services, and the costs imposed on networks that cannot readily replace it. Dependence explains the persistence of that power. It does not establish a right to exercise it without external limits.

The Paradox the Room Cannot Solve

The small-room problem appears directly in APNIC’s own record. At its March 2023 AGM, the explanation for changing SIG election procedures was that elections normally attracting 50 to 100 votes could be determined by an organised bloc of about 250. The size of the existing electorate made a relatively modest influx consequential.²⁶

The small electorate now performs two opposite services. In the openness defence, a modest influx makes institutional correction easy. In the capture defence, a modest influx makes institutional control fragile. The arithmetic has not changed. The supposedly available route to reform has become a vulnerability to be contained.^{4, 26}

Existing participants also organise. They recruit allies, support candidates and develop shared priorities. Their coordination does not become neutral merely because it predates a challenge. A process that recognises established coordination as community and unfamiliar coordination as capture has assigned political privilege to incumbency.

A well-funded organisation can pay people to accumulate the required participation. An operator occupied with running a network may have no such record. The barrier rewards investment in institutional life. It cannot establish a delegation of authority from the networks outside it.

Who controls admission to the body that supposedly controls the institution? Where the institution defines its electorate and certifies its prospective successors, accountability runs through boundaries it helps to administer. The challenger must produce a documented qualification. The institution answers the question of its own authority by pointing back to the people it has qualified.

The absurdity begins with what the contest is supposed to deliver. Small internal constituencies are treated as a source of authority for rules applied at continental scale. A technical meeting has assumed the role of a quasi-political body. Its claim to that role rests on the very openness that makes it vulnerable to a better-organised group.^{2, 4}

On the openness argument’s own terms, suppose a decisive selection rests with twenty regular participants. Thirty genuine newcomers arrive and are entitled to take part. They can change the result. Nothing in the open-door theory gives the original twenty a superior claim merely because they arrived earlier.

The regulars can recruit forty additional supporters. The challengers can recruit more. As long as control of the room carries power over networks outside it, recruitment becomes an arms race. Each side has a reason to enlarge its bloc. Winning determines who occupies the central position; it supplies no delegation from the networks whose fate that position can affect. The missing mandate has become a competition to assemble a larger crowd.

Eligibility restrictions offer the incumbents a way out of the recruitment contest. The contest can be bounded by requiring a history of participation, institutional assessment or membership in a prescribed class. The room becomes harder to overturn because fewer outsiders qualify to contest its leadership. But that protection withdraws the premise of the openness defence: the wider community cannot simply arrive and change the people exercising power.

The model has reached a dead end. Keep entry open, and control remains contestable through mobilisation. Restrict entry to protect an established constituency, and openness can no longer justify the boundary. Neither choice creates the external mandate. A system that authorises itself through its own participants cannot manufacture that authorisation by changing the conditions of participation.

Decentralisation Removes the Prize

The way out is to remove the central power over which the recruitment contest takes place. For Internet number coordination, the alternative is a distributed, verifiable ledger that preserves uniqueness and records legitimate resource control. Preserving that record does not create a need for a private political authority above the networks using it.

The common rules should establish how valid records are authenticated, updated and checked for conflicts. Operators must be able to verify those records without depending on one registry’s continuing approval. Administrators should be replaceable while valid registrations, security assertions and operational continuity survive the replacement. Disputed rights belong before independent adjudicators; an internal election must not determine whether an operating network continues to have a valid place in the record.^{30, 31}

Decentralisation must therefore distribute validation and remove the institutional veto over valid records. Replicating a database while leaving one body able to declare an operator invalid preserves the central power. The design must make the record verifiable and the administrator replaceable, so that a network’s continuity no longer depends on which faction controls a registry.

The design principles already set out in Note 64 follow directly: Minimum Initial Specification limits the common layer to what functioning networks require; Localized Future Decision leaves other choices with those responsible for them; Voluntary Adoption makes further change depend on implementation and uptake. A room cannot convert a proposal into an obligation merely by declaring consensus.³⁰

A design that meets these requirements removes the prize from the small-room contest: unilateral power over another network’s valid record. Twenty people may organise a meeting. Thirty others may organise another. Neither acquires a unilateral veto over everyone else’s functioning network. Once holding office ceases to confer that power, capturing the office ceases to deliver it. The ledger can continue doing its technical job without appointing a political superior to the Internet.

The record of the 2020s shows the admissions machinery becoming more elaborate while the claimed mandate remains an assertion. The admission requirements grow more exact. The missing delegation from the people outside remains missing. Another qualification cannot resolve this contradiction. The solution is decentralisation of the coordination function, ending the conversion of a necessary ledger into a seat of government.

An open door could not supply the missing mandate. A guarded door is an even stranger proof of it.

A cult can choose its own leaders. It cannot thereby acquire the right to govern everyone outside it.

This article was originally published on the author’s website: Note 77: Openness Alibi