ICANN fosters some Not-So-Smart Ideas for AFRINIC

For the past four years, AFRINIC, the Regional Address Registry (RIR) for Africa, has been paralyzed by its legal conflict with Cloud Innovation in the Mauritius courts. The root cause of the conflict was a policy dispute over the inter-regional use of IP addresses. (see this article) Keep that root cause in mind as we wade through the fallout from this policy dispute, because many proposals to “reform” AFRINIC would rekindle that conflict.

The good news is that AFRINIC is alive again. In September 2025 it reconstituted itself by electing a new board. It is now in a position to function.

Rise of SmartAfrica

While AFRINIC was paralyzed, an ambitious organization calling itself Smart Africa stepped into the ICANN meeting circuit. Smart Africa traces its roots to the 2013 Transform Africa Summit, in which 7 African heads of state endorsed a “Smart Africa Manifesto” which called for Africa to promote development by means of ICT and private sector leadership. ICT for development is not a bad idea, but people have been singing that song since 1999. Who cares? In the AFRINIC crisis, however, SmartAfrica found that it could make itself relevant by positioning itself as the agent for the reform of the African IP address registry.

So SmartAfrica came to ICANN looking for money and recognition, and soon the two signed a Memorandum of Understanding. The MoU says the parties will “facilitate the participation of African stakeholders in the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC),” “enhance the involvement of various stakeholders (e.g., government actors) in the governance of Internet infrastructure,” all in the name of “the multistakeholder model of Internet governance.” The ultimate outcome of this MoU, however, is an attempt to put a council of African Regulators in charge of AFRINIC. So ICANN, which positions itself as the ultimate manifestation of bottom-up governance by nonstate actors, and which fought for years to rid itself of political oversight by the U.S. government, is supporting Smart Africa, an organization that promotes digital sovereignty, has a board composed of heads of state, and issues rhetoric that calls for political oversight of its Regional Internet Registry.

This is creating a bit of a scandal, so once again, AFRINIC is the center of the Internet governance world’s attention. Poor AFRINIC.

African Internet Community Objects

Notably, it was Africans who first brought this to the world’s attention. Kenyan Alice Munyua, formerly an Internet Society trustee and ICANN GAC chair, wrote that Smart Africa was pushing for “a new layer of governmental and regulatory authority positioned above AFRINIC’s elected board.” Her post was based on the work of Amin Dayekh, a Nigerian network engineer, who asserted that Smart Africa’s plans for AFRINIC introduces a “top-down intergovernmental layer under Smart Africa” and “creates a dual reporting structure outside AFRINIC’s member oversight, merging political and technical functions.” ICANN’s Noncommercial Stakeholders Group, joined the fray, writing a letter to the Board demanding an explanation of ICANN’s role in this mess.

Both Munyua and Dayekh believe that SmartAfrica tried to get control of AFRINIC’s board in the latest election. They are wrong, but ironically, SmartAfrica itself would like everyone to believe that. They endorsed a slate of board candidates, and all but one of them was elected. Emmanuel Vitus, one of SmartAfrica’s defenders, tells us that it was only SmartAfrica’s involvement in the election that saved the registry. I disagree. It was AFRINIC members who saved the day. The African ISP Association endorsed a slate of 8 candidates and all 8 were elected. The SmartAfrica slate differed from the ISPA slate, in fact, by only one candidate, and the candidate who was not elected, Rodrigue Guiguemde, was the one most closely associated with SmartAfrica. SmartAfrica’s list merely echoed what most ISPA and AFRINIC members considered continental leaders in Internet governance: people like Kenya’s Fiona Asonga and Morocco’s Aziz Hillali.

CAIGA

The real issue here is not Smart Africa’s election endorsements, but its proposed reform: a Council of African Internet Governance Authorities (CAIGA). This proposal would create a pan-African Council with supervisory powers over the regional address registry. SmartAfrica, presumably with the support of its vaunted “heads of state,” would set all this in motion, not AFRINIC members. The power structure is clear, but the details are not; in fact, CAIGA is little more than a set of powerpoint slides at this point, and complaints that it is some kind of detailed blueprint for control are incorrect.

Based on what little we know about it, CAIGA does not address any of the policy or legal vulnerabilities that crashed AFRINIC. In fact, it would make them worse, and add some new ones. Attempting to execute this vague plan now would guarantee another 5 years of  instability and paralysis by tossing control of the address registry into a political football game. The “Council” would be an as-yet unformed, totally untested group selected by a board dominated by African heads of state, with unclear powers over registry operations. While all this political jockeying goes on, who is going to actually manage and operate the registry? Subject to top-down governance and second-guessing by politicians and state regulators, how does AFRINIC’s new board learn how to manage the registry properly? What happens to the AFRINIC members – Internet service providers, network operators, corporations – who rely on AFRINIC’s services for the operation of their networks? How well will AFRINIC implement complex routing security technologies (RPKI) under these conditions?

In short, how do calls for digital sovereignty make AFRINIC function better, especially when they are uttered by a uniformed military dictator who has just dissolved his parliament, engineered a coup, or invaded a neighboring territory? If anything like CAIGA happens (and assuming it doesn’t take 15 years to implement), AFRINIC members will have voted in a board that has no power. The registry will not be governed by a member-elected board, it will be governed by a highly political group assembled by SmartAfrica, people who are not network operators and don’t know a subnet mask from a Halloween mask.

ICANN’s Role

ICANN shares a great deal of the responsibility for this debacle. SmartAfrica is systematically working the ICANN meeting circuit to promote its plans and gain support, with the support of the ICANN “engagement” staff, which sees it as something that helps ICANN by giving African governments more power in exchange for their participation in the regime. (The fact that they are all participating already, through the GAC, does not seem sufficient to ICANN, which is worrisome.)

ICANN’s quest for legitimacy and support from governments is undermining its own ethos. It is trying to co-opt nation-states by inviting them into its processes as a partner/client. In Africa, it has a wild, wide-open set of choices as to whom it recognizes as the agents of those nation-states. Who selected SmartAfrica as the agent of change, after all, other than ICANN and SmartAfrica itself? I guess you could say the coalition of heads of state, but are they really in charge or are they tokens collected by the folks who run SmartAfrica? No need for ICANN to go through formal diplomatic channels, no need to use established processes in AFRINIC. Just see who comes to your meetings and what kind of political support they promise to deliver. This takes ICANN far outside its mission and sucks power away from its direct stakeholders. The Internet Society should be screaming bloody murder about this.

Alice Munyua was correct to detect a strong smell of Western paternalism here. Why is ICANN Inc. picking the agents for the reform of an African regional registry? If a bunch of European heads of state was proposing to take over RIPE-NCC, would ICANN offer them a MoU to facilitate the process? If the Trump administration suddenly wanted to take over ARIN, would ICANN shake hands with the Heritage Foundation and fund conferences during its meetings, so that Republican nationalists in America could grab a supervisory role over the North American registry? In ICANN’s MoU, we see an implicit assumption that Africans can’t take care of themselves, so the great white fathers of Global Engagement must foster the reform process.

Digital sovereignty

Some members of Smart Africa, most notably its CEO, Mr. Lacina Koné, are really the threat Munyua and Dayekh describe them as. Despite SmartAfrica’s verbal commitment to “private sector first, Koné sees the AFRINIC crisis as an opportunity to reverse history and put governments on top of the Internet institutions. He says: “for a long time in Africa, Internet governance has been driven by the private sector and the civil society and I applaud smart Africa for taking this initiative to bring the government to the forefront of Internet governance.” Smart African staff constantly use the language of digital sovereignty to frame their goals. One of the “pillars” of the CAIGA slide set is “Infrastructure Sovereignty,” which they describe as “Advocate for sovereign management of IP addresses to safeguard digital sovereignty,” and “making sure that countries hold sovereignty when it comes to their infrastructure.”

On the other hand, the real Internet community in Africa, are simply concerned about Cloud Innovation’s paralysis of the AFRINIC address registry. Will it happen again? They are also worried about its prior history of corruption. Will it happen again? Many of these people believe the AFRINIC episode has “tarnished the reputation of the continent.” It literally embarrasses them. If they attend SmartAfrica meetings, it’s because they just want to mobilize an effective response to the crisis, and ICANN Org has made SmartAfrica the only game in town.

What we need to recognize now is that an effective response is already underway. AFRINIC members held an election, and replaced the board. The board can now appoint a manager and resume operation as a registry. They need to start self-governing. Brian Longwe made some important points about what needs to happen next: professional management is the key. Longwe raised legitimate concerns about whether the new board is ready for this. But SmartAfrica and its CAIGA are not the answer to these weaknesses. The last thing AFRINIC needs is a gigantic overhaul of its entire governance structure by a political entity.

ICANN has distanced itself from CAIGA. We were just facilitating a process, they claim. In other words, they contracted for it, spent money on it, and helped the entity access the ICANN community in official meetings, accepted the explicit thank-yous from SmartAfrica and its consultant for its “help,” but takes no responsibility for the results.

Does ICANN do this because it is just geopolitically stupid – so blindly invested in the idea that states are “just another stakeholder” – that they are unaware of the dangers of bringing states and geopolitics into the regime? Is ICANN’s board and management aware of where digital sovereignty talk leads? Do they understand that if a bunch of organized states can just take over AFRINIC’s supervision in the name of sovereignty, a bunch of organized states – or maybe just one! – could take over ICANN? There is no better illustration of the pathologies set in motion by the concept of digital sovereignty than this.

Digital sovereignty is a corrupt concept; everyone involved in the Internet institutions should avoid using the term and oppose what it stands for. It confuses practical issues of global Internet address governance with identity politics, state sovereignty, and arbitrary territorial boundaries. In Africa, it doesn’t even provide a clear picture of who or what is going to be “sovereign.” Africa, after all, is not a sovereign political territory; it consists of more than 50 sovereigns. And the policies governing address registries affect everyone on the Internet, not just Africa.

Avoiding or repeating past mistakes?

Now we get to the real nub of the issue. The fact that AFRINIC gave Cloud Innovation blocks of IPv4 addresses and it leased them to Chinese firms is not, by itself, what precipitated the legal conflicts that brought AFRINIC down. It was AFRINIC’s attempts to retrieve those addresses that led to the explosion. Cloud Innovation’s legal tactics were unethical and excessive, but AFRINIC’s insistence that it could kill a business to enforce territorial exclusivity on the use of IP addresses was just as destructive. They picked a fight, and got a bloody nose. Before you start a fight, better assess what happens if you lose.

Unbelievably, some of the “reformers” in SmartAfrica are insisting that one of the first acts of the reconstituted AFRINIC should be to expel Cloud Innovation from its membership and renew the attempt to retrieve its address allocations. This recommendation is insane. It guarantees another waste of time, money and energy on litigation. It will renew contestation for board seats and lead to more attempts to bribe members or propagandize them in a polarized information war. It throws AFRINIC back into the arms of Mauritius’s bizarre legal system. It will distract AFRINIC from pursuing its real mission, which is to act as an address registry. And all for what? There is really no way to fully reuse IP addresses that have been allocated and used by a network for many years; numbers are not automobiles that can be repossessed. So whatever address space would be “retrieved” by this action would not be usable for a while. The victory would be hollow. But it would make some African states feel “sovereign.” Another example of how foolish and destructive digital sovereignty is.

The whole idea that IP numbers “belong” to geographic territories and that Internet address registries should carve up the world into exclusive territories is just wrong. RIRs are trying to impose territorial boundaries upon technical resources that are not geographical. And they are trying to do so where the market for IPv4 addresses produces a constant stream of transfers of IPv4 number blocks from one geographic location to another. Address markets are a necessary and beneficial response to the need to reallocate IPv4 numbers. They are going to exist in one form or another whether we like them or not.

Sovereignty means supreme authority within a bounded territory, coupled with recognition by other sovereigns. It applies to armies, police, courts, elections and physical infrastructure regulation. Digital sovereignty is a meaningless concept when it comes to virtual resources and the global technical standards underpinning the Internet. Cyberspace is virtual, not geographical. The pursuit of digital sovereignty triggers endless power struggles over a kind of exclusive control that no one can ever have. As IGP has pointed out again and again, despite the many, cute variations of “sovereignty” definitions academic scribblers have come up with, the use of this term in a digital policy context can only empower states and fragment global internet governance along jurisdictional lines. The only winner of any sovereignty claim is the state, because supreme and exclusive power over a territory can only be maintained through violence, and states are the institutionalization of violence. Making digital sovereignty a desirable norm in Internet governance invites states to take control.

Please follow and like us: