An IP address has no continent

An IP address is a number, like a telephone number.

It has no soil, no flag and no passport, and it works for one reason only: every network in the world accepts that one network uses it and no other. The numbers AFRINIC registers did not come out of African ground. By AFRINIC’s own account they “are allocated to AFRINIC and the four other RIRs by Public Technical Identifiers (PTI)”, the body that coordinates the internet’s identifiers for the whole world. A number does not belong to a place.

The regions were drawn for convenience.

The document that first proposed regional registries, in 1992, gives the reason: registries in different parts of the world “may be better able to serve the local community in terms of language and local customs”. Nothing more was claimed for them. Karl Auerbach, an early internet engineer and former ICANN director, has described his last conversation with Jon Postel, who ran the internet’s number assignments until 1998: the regions were drawn “rather arbitrarily” in places, Africa among them, and he left it, as he believes Postel did, feeling that the registries would have been better as “temporary organizations that could be created, removed, aggregated, or split”. A region is the area one office serves, as a branch serves a district. It is not a people, a nation or a property line. A map of service desks is not a map of owners.

A continent cannot own anything.

Political ownership belongs to a people: those who share a culture, a history and an identity, and a government that answers for them. A continent is a shape on a map. What do Cairo, Kinshasa and Cape Town share, beyond that map? Not a language, not a legal system, not a history and not a government, and nobody in any of them has voted to hold anything in common with the other two. Africa is 54 countries, and each owns what its own law says it owns. “Africa’s IP addresses” would need an owner called Africa. There is none: there is only a private company in Mauritius that would like to be taken for one.

A network in Africa cannot choose its registry.

The same 1992 document asked for “just a single regional registry per geographical region”, for efficiency, and so there is one: AFRINIC. Since 4 February 2026 a network cannot leave with its addresses either: under the transfer policy AFRINIC’s Board ratified that day, in AFRINIC’s own words, “AFRINIC-issued IPv4 cannot be transferred out of the region”. Its own assessment said why: “AFRINIC will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs in outgoing transfers.” A sole provider owes its customers more, not less. This one has decided that it owns them.

Try the claim with any other record-keeper.

The land registry records who owns the land, and owns none of it. The office that issues number plates does not own the cars, or say where they may be driven. The telephone directory has never claimed the telephones. Each of them is the only one of its kind where it works, and none has concluded that the district is therefore its property. Only here does the clerk say the ledger makes him the landlord.

A network uses its addresses where its customers are.

That is what a network is, on every continent: the internet has no customs posts. Our customers are network operators in 60 countries who keep hundreds of millions of people online, and where their addresses are used is no secret. LARUS, which operates our addresses, publishes it in the standard format operators use for this (RFC 8805): a geofeed that gives the country and city of each prefix, for anyone to read.

The addresses that were found taken without justification were taken inside AFRINIC.

Its own audit, published in 2021, found 2,371,584 IPv4 addresses “misappropriated from AFRINIC’s pool of resources and attributed to organisations without justification”; a former employee “was found to have misappropriated” resources from that pool. Those are AFRINIC’s own findings, about its own house.

A network is safe when its registry cannot take its addresses away.

In July 2021 AFRINIC’s Board resolved to end our membership, which would have taken back the addresses our customers’ networks run on, and the Judge in Chambers restrained AFRINIC from freezing or reclaiming them. No slogan about where addresses belong protects an operator. A rule that the registry cannot seize them does, with a vote in that registry, a court that will hear the case and the freedom to leave.