IP for Africa, not Africa for AFRINIC: the slogan, taken back

Summary

In Note 78, “IP for Africa, Not Africa for AFRINIC”, published on 13 November 2026, Lu Heng keeps the slogan and reverses its direction: “IP for Africa” means a network in Lagos, Bujumbura or Maseru owns the addresses it runs on. Those who control AFRINIC, he writes, read it backwards, as “Africa for AFRINIC”.
The documents are on his side. The 1992 proposal for regional registries asked for them on grounds of “language and local customs”. AFRINIC’s own website says its numbers are allocated to it by a global body. Its own staff assessment says its new transfer policy means it “will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs”.
Cloud Innovation has published four pages that set the argument out with the record attached, and five questions that any government, regulator or operator in Africa can put to AFRINIC without hiring a lawyer.

The slogan was never the problem

Slogans win arguments that evidence cannot. “IP for Africa” has been one of the most effective in internet governance: three words that make any network registered through AFRINIC sound like a suspect, and the registry sound like a guardian.

Lu Heng’s reply does not fight the phrase. “It is a good phrase. I agree with it,” he writes. “The trouble is not the phrase. The trouble is the direction in which it is read.”

Read forwards, in his account, it is a promise from a registry to its customers: you will get the addresses you need, and the ones you run on are yours. Read backwards it becomes “Africa for AFRINIC”, a claim by the record-keeper over everything in the record.

He sets out how that claim is built, one step at a time. Because AFRINIC is the registry for Africa, the addresses it registers are Africa’s. Because they are Africa’s, they must stay. Because they must stay, a network may not leave with them. Because it may not leave, it answers to AFRINIC. And because AFRINIC is the only registry available, there is no one else to answer to. “Each step sounds like stewardship,” he writes. “Together they are a land claim made by a filing clerk.”

What the 1992 design actually handed out

The regional registries were never given a homeland. RFC 1366, the 1992 document that proposed distributing the registration function, gives its reason in one sentence: registries in distinct geographic areas “may be better able to serve the local community in terms of language and local customs”. It also asks for “just a single regional registry per geographical region”, for efficiency.

That is the whole inheritance. “So the design gave us two things: a convenience and a monopoly,” Lu Heng writes. “It did not give anyone a continent.”

Karl Auerbach, an early internet engineer and former ICANN director, has added a recollection that makes the point sharper. Commenting on 31 March 2026 under an article by Lu Heng on CircleID, he described his last conversation with Jon Postel. In Auerbach’s memory the regions were drawn “rather arbitrarily” in places, and he names Africa. He left that conversation believing, as he thinks Postel did, that the registries would have been better formed as “temporary organizations that could be created, removed, aggregated, or split” as the network changed.

Lu Heng compresses the history into two lines: “A help desk was assigned a district. It has since declared the district its estate.”

A number has no continent, and a continent has no owner

An IP address is a number in a record. It works because every network in the world accepts that one network uses it and no other. AFRINIC is not where those numbers come from, and it says so: according to its own About page, internet number resources “are allocated to AFRINIC and the four other RIRs by Public Technical Identifiers (PTI)”, the body that performs the IANA functions for the whole internet. “AFRINIC is a counter in a global system,” in Lu Heng’s phrase.

The same page describes AFRINIC as “a nonprofit, member-based organisation registered and operating under the Corporate Legal Frameworks of Mauritius”, and gives its mission as “To serve the African Internet community”. Serve is the operative verb. A company registered in Mauritius is not a continent, and Note 78 argues that a continent cannot be an owner in any case. Political ownership, Lu Heng writes, belongs to a people with a shared culture, history and identity, and a government that answers for them. “What do Cairo, Kinshasa and Cape Town share, beyond that map?” Africa is 54 countries, each of which owns what its own law says it owns.

Cloud Innovation’s page “An IP address has no continent” tries the claim on other record-keepers. The land registry records every title deed and owns none of the land. The office that issues number plates does not own the cars. The telephone directory has never claimed the telephones. “Only here does the clerk say the ledger makes him the landlord.”

The only registry in town, and the door it locked

A sole provider owes its customers more, not less. AFRINIC has gone the other way, and its own paperwork says why.

On 4 February 2026 AFRINIC’s Board ratified a number resources transfer policy. AFRINIC’s summary of the ratified policy states the central rule in one line: “AFRINIC-issued IPv4 cannot be transferred out of the region”. The staff assessment published with the proposal records what that rule does for the registry: “AFRINIC will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs in outgoing transfers.” The legal assessment on the same page calls the choice “purely and simply a business decision”.

That is AFRINIC, in AFRINIC’s words, explaining that the fence protects its membership roll. Note 78 draws the conclusion the documents invite: “A provider that locks the door and takes away the vote is not protecting Africa. It is protecting itself from its customers.” The vote is the other half of the sentence. Cloud Innovation’s reading of AFRINIC’s proposed constitution, set out on its site, is that the draft drops the members’ power to set AFRINIC’s general policies.

What went missing went missing in the registry

Lu Heng does not write from a distance, and says so. In 2021 AFRINIC’s management, and then its Board, moved to end Cloud Innovation’s membership, which would have taken back the addresses its customers’ networks run on. Cloud Innovation says those customers are operators in 60 countries. The Judge in Chambers of the Supreme Court of Mauritius stopped AFRINIC three times that year, on 29 March, 13 July and 3 December; the orders are in Cloud Innovation’s public record.

The addresses that were actually found to have been taken were found by AFRINIC, inside AFRINIC. Its audit of its own WHOIS database, published in January 2021, found that 2,371,584 IPv4 addresses had been “misappropriated from AFRINIC’s pool of resources and attributed to organisations without justification”, and that a former employee “was found to have misappropriated” resources from that pool.

“Nothing was taken from Africa by the networks that registered there,” Lu Heng writes. “What went missing went missing in the registry.”

The promise, and five questions

Note 78 ends by keeping the slogan and stating what it commits a registry to. A network owns the addresses it runs on. It “holds them, uses them wherever its customers are, takes them to another registry if it chooses, and sells its services to the world.” It has a vote in the registry that serves it, a court to turn to when that registry overreaches, and the freedom to leave. “The deed is the network’s. The registry records it.”

Cloud Innovation’s four pages carry the argument into the questions people actually search for: “IP for Africa. Not Africa for AFRINIC.”, “An IP address has no continent”, “Who controls Africa’s internet?” and “Own your IP”. The first closes with five questions for AFRINIC:

You keep the address book. When did that make the city yours?
Who gave a private company in Mauritius a mandate to speak for 54 countries?
Why may a network in Africa not choose another registry, or take its addresses to one?
Why should members give up their power to set AFRINIC’s policies?
Where are the 2,371,584 addresses your own audit found misappropriated?

Each can be answered in a paragraph. The slogan, meanwhile, has changed hands. “A registry is not a continent,” Lu Heng concludes. “A monopoly is not a mandate. IP for Africa. Not Africa for AFRINIC.”