Can AFRINIC terminate your membership, and take your addresses?

AFRINIC’s management says it can.

In March 2021 it gave us 30 days to answer what the Court later called “purported breaches”, or face termination at its “sole discretion”. Every network that registers with AFRINIC signs the same Registration Service Agreement we did. A registry that can put out a member at its sole discretion holds every network hostage.

AFRINIC revokes them.

Its agreement says that if it ends, “AFRINIC will immediately revoke the number resources” and stop its services “without incurring any liability whatsoever”. The same agreement makes each network acknowledge that the number resources “are not property (real, personal or intellectual)”, and caps AFRINIC’s liability at six months of fees or 100 USD, whichever is greater. For a network, revoked addresses mean customers offline. For AFRINIC, the price of getting it wrong is a hundred dollars. We say the opposite of that contract: the network that runs on an address owns it, and the registry only records it.

Yes, in 2021, and the member was us.

AFRINIC’s management, and then its Board, moved to end our membership, which would have taken back the addresses our customers’ networks run on: operators in 60 countries who keep hundreds of millions of people online. The letter that began it was sent on the first day of a national lockdown in Mauritius, “when access to justice was very limited”, as the Court later recorded. On 8 July 2021 the Board resolved to go through with it.

The Supreme Court of Mauritius stopped it three times.

On 29 March 2021 the Judge in Chambers restrained AFRINIC from terminating, suspending or revoking our membership. On 13 July 2021 the Court restrained it from acting on the Board’s resolution and from freezing or reclaiming the addresses; that order was “deliberately flouted” by those then running AFRINIC, as the judgment of 19 July 2022 records, and on 15 July 2021 AFRINIC gave the Judge an unconditional undertaking to comply. On 3 December 2021 the Court restrained AFRINIC from terminating our membership until the dispute is finally determined. When AFRINIC’s management asked the Court to treat our applications as an abuse of its process, the Court refused: Cloud Innovation “cannot be taxed for resorting to an independent court to safeguard its rights”.

It could leave the decision to officers.

Article 8.6 of the draft permits the suspension and termination of members to be delegated to officers, subject to safeguards and appeal, and Article 8.5 keeps the rule that a terminated member returns its addresses. Membership decisions stay tied to control over the addresses a network runs on, the power AFRINIC tried to use against us in 2021.

Not the addresses AFRINIC issued.

Under the transfer policy AFRINIC’s Board ratified on 4 February 2026, in AFRINIC’s own words, “AFRINIC-issued IPv4 cannot be transferred out of the region”. Its own assessment said what the rule is for: “AFRINIC will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs in outgoing transfers.” So a member can be put out but cannot walk out: AFRINIC may end the relationship and keep the addresses, and the member may not end it and keep them.

A court.

What stood between our customers’ networks and that power in 2021 was the Supreme Court of Mauritius. A place on AFRINIC’s register of members should protect a member too: every eligible Resource Member should be recognised under company law, entered in the register and protected by the rights that come with it, as we said on 1 November 2026. We advocate secure ownership of lawfully held addresses, continuity of use, transferability and the freedom to change registry: no network should be put out at a registry’s whim.