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Latest intelligence on infrastructure operators, policy decisions, market moves, and digital power shifts.
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Who Gets to Choose? The Boundary in the NRO’s AFRINIC Re-engagement Proposal
On 26 March 2023, the Number Resource Organization asked ICANN to help re-engage the AFRINIC community around a fair and transparent Board election with active membership and community involvement. That was a constructive destination for a registry in need of functioning…
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The Injunction That Lost Its Forum: Seychelles, AFRINIC and the Limits of Cross-Border Relief
An order protecting a registry member’s position can look operationally decisive while resting on a procedural foundation that remains contestable. In *Cloud Innovation Ltd v African Network Information Centre Ltd*, the Supreme Court of Seychelles removed its own interim…
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The Noun That Held the Procedure Together
On 21 June 2022, AFRINIC’s sixth draft of its working-group guidelines replaced the CEO with the Appeal Committee as the actor whose decision would end one internal appeal. The change was only a few words long. It nevertheless exposed the real subject of the proposal: not…
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Who Held the Proposal After Consensus? AFRINIC’s Unfinished Withdrawal Rule
On 28 July 2022, AFRINIC recorded consensus, a report sent to its Board, and an author’s withdrawal against the same proposal. The record captures a procedural collision but does not settle it. What it reveals is a missing transfer point between personal authorship, collective…
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When Private Coordination Looks Upward: The NRO’s Mauritius Appeal
On 12 July 2022, the Number Resource Organization published a letter asking two Mauritian officials to attend to pressures on AFRINIC after court orders had affected the registry’s bank access and director election. The appeal came from four executives of AFRINIC’s peer…
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AFRINIC Did Not Oppose the Motion—and the Court Still Set It Aside
Silvio Cabral Almada came to court through a narrow corporate-rescue provision, and AFRINIC said it did not entity. Yet an older order already occupied the ground on which the new request would have operated. The result shows why registry prominence, corporate standing, judicial…
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The Empty Office: When AFRINIC’s Litigation Mandate Lost Its Instruction Point
On 4 November 2022, Eddy Kayihura ceased to be AFRINIC’s chief executive officer. The private company remained, its disputes remained and its lawyers remained available, but the human being whom an earlier Board resolution had authorised to instruct those lawyers no longer…
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The Injunction That Split the Office From the Seat
On 30 June 2022, a Mauritian court temporarily stopped action under AFRINIC’s sweeping litigation delegation and stopped its chief executive from acting as an ex officio director until an election reconstituted the Board. The importance of the order lies not in any final…
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Consensus at the Threshold: AFRINIC’s Draft 3 Handoff Without Ratification
On 28 July 2022, AFRINIC’s Policy Development Working Group crossed one procedural threshold and stopped before another: consensus on Update PDP Draft 3 was announced, and the chairs sent a ratification report to the Board. The distinction between those acts and a Board decision…
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Four Lamps, One Boundary: What the Peer RIR Message to AFRINIC Could—and Could Not—Authorize
Four registry executives turned AFRINIC’s difficulties into a matter of global concern while drawing a line around their own authority. Their June 2022 message is most useful not as a declaration of institutional solidarity, but as an unfinished test of what one private technical…
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The Five Days Between a Right and a Vote
On 28 May 2022, AFRINIC’s published election timeline closed proxy registration and appointment for a Board and Governance Committee election due on 3 June. That five-day interval looks like a small piece of meeting administration. In practice, it was the space in which a…
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When a Meeting-Triggered Office Has No Meeting to End It
Resolution 202206.699 gave two AFRINIC board officers a term measured not by a date but by a sequence: the 2023 Annual General Members’ Meeting, followed by the first Board meeting after it. That formulation can bridge an ordinary transition. It becomes unstable when the sequence…
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The pledge that doubled under strain: AFRINIC’s joint-stability paradox
In a terse April 2022 resolution, AFRINIC changed one figure from USD 50,000 to USD 100,000. The record is striking not because it proves that money moved—it does not—but because a registry facing documented legal and banking strain remained on the contributor’s side of a joint…
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Five routes to one duty: AFRINIC’s 2022 Appeal Committee and the meaning of an independent seat
AFRINIC filled five Appeal Committee seats through five prescribed experience channels in April 2022. That architecture promised continuity and informed review, yet its real test lay elsewhere: whether each route ended in a person exercising independent judgment, rather than in…
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When the Ledger Opens the Ballot: AFRINIC’s 2022 Good-Standing Gate
On 3 June 2022, a quiet administrative output sat between an AFRINIC Resource Member and an internal vote: good standing. That output condensed contracts, membership formalities, fee dates, account age, contact authority and portal status into a practical yes or no. The…
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The rulebook under load: AFRINIC’s Draft 3 and the limits of private consensus
On 18 May 2022, a seventeen-page proposal sought to rebuild the procedure through which AFRINIC made policy, just as the registry was approaching a public meeting and facing a documented risk to ordinary Board quorum. The design promised firmer clocks, earlier evidence and…
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Three seats, five for quorum: AFRINIC’s succession circuit breaker
On 28 April 2022, AFRINIC’s Governance Committee offered a strikingly simple answer to a complicated succession problem: never open more than three Board seats at one Annual General Members’ Meeting. Its schedule placed Seats 1, 2 and 7 in 2022, Seats 3, 4 and 8 in 2023, and…
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The line an election cannot cross: AFRINIC’s three-year term boundary
In April 2022, AFRINIC’s Governance Committee confronted a deceptively simple succession problem: a temporary appointee could be required to leave at the next annual general members’ meeting, yet the director then elected would ordinarily receive a full three-year term inside a…
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The $15,000 constitutional maintenance question
AFRINIC authorised no more than US$15,000 for a requested two-day Governance Committee working session in Kenya on 23–24 April 2022, with one stated assignment: address the election-sequence problem already recorded in Resolution 202202.677. That modest-looking budget line offers…
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Who Could Select, Not Who Could Stand: AFRINIC’s 2022 Regional NomCom Rule
Northern and Western Africans were not barred from AFRINIC’s planned 2022 Board election. Residents of those two regions were required for the corresponding regional candidacies, but they were ineligible to sit on the four-person Nomination Committee that filtered nominations…