AFRINIC: registry continuity under legal scrutiny

What can be verified before the dispute

AFRINIC's homepage uses a plain self-description: the Regional Internet Registry for Africa. NRO's RIR table places its establishment in 2005, its location in Mauritius and its service region in Africa, and lists 2,566 members as at 30 June 2026. IANA's number-resources page assigns AFRINIC to the Africa region and describes IANA's role as global coordination of IP addressing systems. These are narrow facts, but they explain why a corporate dispute can reach network operators: the registry sits in the path of address records, routing data and resource certification.

AFRINIC's own pages describe registry services, policy participation, learning and community activity. Its WHOIS page lists public query tools and describes RDAP as the modern successor to traditional WHOIS. The membership page distinguishes Local Internet Registry and End User membership and says fees depend on address-space size and the organisation's operations. The corporate-documents page lists bylaws, finance and annual reports, the Consolidated Policy Manual, a service-level commitment, the Registration Service Agreement and the Associate Member Agreement.

These pages do not prove operational uptime, but they identify the functions and documents that a continuity assessment should check.

Membership, fees and the two agreements

AFRINIC's fee page is unusually explicit about its own limits. It says the document details the fee schedule as of 2008 unless otherwise amended. Annual membership is based on the member's category, derived by aggregating all billable resources held. The page lists the extra-large LIR category at USD 38,400 and says transfers between two existing Resource Members carry no IP or ASN transfer fee ‘at the moment’. Those details show a fee model tied to resource categories, not a market price for address blocks. The page is a current capture, not proof of any historical price.

The agreements page says AFRINIC membership is governed by two agreements: the Registration Service Agreement for Resource Members and the Associate Member Agreement for Associate Members. It also says the English version is the only legally binding version. That matters in a dispute where public summaries, translations and press statements circulate faster than signed texts. A reader should treat the agreements page as an index, not as a substitute for the executed agreement.

Policy is open; legal authority is separate

AFRINIC's policy page says there is no specific requirement to participate in the Policy Development Process and that anyone may propose or discuss policy regardless of location, gender or race. It says discussions happen mainly on the resource-policy mailing list and at Public Policy Meetings, which take place twice yearly. It describes a process with submission, analysis, discussion, meeting, Last Call and Board ratification. The same page lists PDWG co-chairs and historical co-chairs.

This openness is real, but it does not resolve legal authority. A policy process can decide what the community wants. It cannot by itself decide whether a particular court order rectified a statutory register, whether a contract permitted a lease, or whether a regulator or court can constrain a board. Those questions require the underlying legal documents. The supplied record contains competing public statements about such documents, not the documents themselves.

Why IPv4 history still shapes the continuity question

AFRINIC's 20 November 2018 news item says IANA allocated the range 45.96.0.0 to 45.111.255.255 to AFRINIC from the recovered IPv4 pool. Its 19 August 2019 item describes the 2011 IPv4 Soft Landing policy and identifies the Final /8 as 102.0.0.0/8, allocated by IANA on 3 February 2011. It says Exhaustion Phase 2 begins when no more than a /11 of non-reserved space remains in the Final /8, and that Phase 2 minimum and maximum allocation sizes are /24 and /22. IANA's IPv4 registry separately lists 41/8 as allocated to AFRINIC in 2005, 102/8 in 2011 and 196/8 as legacy space administered by AFRINIC from 1993.

The statistics page lists 41/8, 102/8, 105/8, 196/8, 197/8 and other fragments, plus IPv6 blocks 2001:4200::/23 and 2c0e::/12. IANA's registry confirms 105/8 and 197/8 as AFRINIC rows. These blocks are not just technical trivia. Scarcity gives registry records economic weight: a historical entry can support routing, customer contracts, security allowlists and financing assumptions. That is why disputes about records, transfers or leasing become continuity questions even when the courtroom issue sounds like company law.

Continuity means records, publication, security and updates

The supplied standards describe why a registry cannot be treated as a mere filing cabinet. RFC 6480 defines the Resource Public Key Infrastructure as the foundation of an architecture for improved routing security. RFC 6482 defines a Route Origin Authorization as a signed entity by which an address-block holder authorises an AS to originate routes. RFC 6486 defines manifests that list repository entities and hashes. RFC 6487 profiles resource certificates and certificate revocation lists. None of these documents proves AFRINIC's current operational state.

They do show that publication and cryptographic trust entities are part of the routing-security layer, not optional public-relations material.

A serious continuity review therefore asks four narrow questions. Can the last verified registration state be produced and audited? Can WHOIS, RDAP, reverse DNS, IRR and RPKI publication continue through institutional stress? Can legitimate updates be separated from disputed changes? Can a court or independent decision change authority without corrupting the record? The supplied AFRINIC pages show that these functions exist. They do not show tested failover, complete RPKI coverage or a settled legal succession plan.

The 2025-2026 dispute: attributed positions, not findings

AFRINIC's 9 May 2026 communique says public statements by entities associated with ‘Larus’ referred to a ‘Court-Ordered Shareholder-Position Continuity Structure’ linked to Supreme Court proceedings in SC/COM/MOT/000399/2025. AFRINIC says the order dated 11 June 2025 did not establish, approve, recognise or create any such structure. It says its understanding is that the relevant undertaking concerned AFRINIC's resource register, not its statutory register of members under the Companies Act, and that it was considering legal steps. This is AFRINIC's account.

LARUS's public pages assert the opposite legal significance: that the 11 June 2025 order directed AFRINIC's register of members to be rectified to add Cloud Innovation Ltd as a Member, that the Registrar of Companies was directed to update records, and that the Receiver undertook to rectify records within 15 days. LARUS also asserts that Cloud Innovation appointed LARUS as the customer-facing platform for the IPv4 estate covered by its mandate. These are party statements. The supplied evidence does not include the order text, the mandate, a company-registry filing or an independent court finding.

AFRINIC's 15 May 2026 communique adds its own account: it says the Supreme Court issued an Interim Order against Cloud Innovation on 14 May 2026 after publications that AFRINIC calls false and misleading, and that the publication incorrectly represented judicial authorisation of leasing AFRINIC-allocated resources. It also says the court allowed ICANN to intervene in the July 2025 winding-up petition, SC/COM/PET/000508/2025. These assertions are significant, but they remain AFRINIC's description until the orders and filings are available.

heng.lu's public homepage carries a different register-continuity argument: a registry should keep the record, not control the network, and networks should be able to change registration provider without losing addresses already in use. That is an attributed viewpoint about portability and institutional power, not a court finding or a verified account of AFRINIC's contracts. Its analytical value is that it separates the ledger from the incumbent institution. Its limits are equally important: the supplied capture contains summaries and note titles, not the full legal or technical argument.

What the record does not establish

The supplied material does not contain the full 11 June 2025 order, the 14 May 2026 Interim Order, the pleadings in SC/COM/PET/000508/2025, ICANN's intervention papers or a Mauritius court judgment on the meaning of the register. AFRINIC's court-cases page says it publishes a case list, but the captured text contains no case entries. The statistics page is not a live registry extract. The fee page explicitly dates its schedule to 2008 unless amended, so it cannot establish 2021 or 2023 prices. LARUS's shareholder-judgment page and heng.lu's homepage are party or author pages, not independent adjudication.

That does not make the continuity question speculative. It makes the evidence standard narrower. A reader can establish AFRINIC's documented registry role, its membership categories, its fee basis, its policy process, its IPv4 allocation history and the existence of competing legal narratives. A reader cannot yet establish which narrative a court will accept, whether a particular lease was authorised, whether a register was rectified, or whether a winding-up petition will succeed.

Practical reading for operators and analysts

Treat official AFRINIC pages as the first stop, but distinguish a page that describes a service from a page that proves service continuity. Check the actual agreement before relying on a summary. Check IANA records before repeating a block allocation. Check the court file before repeating a party's account of an order. Check whether a fee statement is current or dated. Check whether a standards document describes a protocol requirement or an operational fact.

The continuity issue is not whether AFRINIC should be defended or dissolved as a slogan. It is whether the record, publication and security functions can survive a dispute among institutions. The supplied sources support a cautious conclusion: AFRINIC's public role and documents are visible; its legal position is contested; and the key court texts are missing. That gap should be stated, not filled with confident narrative.