AFRINIC vs Cloud Innovation: what the courts decided

The case is about whether a registry can put a member out at its own discretion.

In March 2021 AFRINIC’s management gave us 30 days to answer what the Court later called “purported breaches”, or face termination at its “sole discretion”. In July 2021 its Board resolved 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. We went to court, and we have been there since.

Three times in 2021 the Judge in Chambers stopped AFRINIC.

On 29 March the Court halted the move against our membership. On 13 July it blocked the Board’s resolution and restrained AFRINIC from freezing or reclaiming the addresses allocated to us and from cutting off our access to its WHOIS database, an order that those then running AFRINIC “deliberately flouted”, as the Court’s judgment of 19 July 2022 records. On 3 December it restrained AFRINIC from terminating our membership until the dispute is finally determined.

AFRINIC then asked the Court to treat our applications as an abuse of its process.

On 19 July 2022 the Court refused: Cloud Innovation “cannot be taxed for resorting to an independent court to safeguard its rights”, and upholding AFRINIC’s objection “would imperil the future administration of justice”. A registry that calls a member’s day in court an abuse has told you what it thinks of courts.

By September 2023 AFRINIC had too few directors for a board quorum and no chief executive.

We applied to the Supreme Court as a member, and on 12 September 2023 it found AFRINIC’s preliminary objections unsubstantiated and the orders we sought “fully justified, reasonable, and fair”. It placed AFRINIC under the Official Receiver, to preserve its assets and to see that elections are held under its constitution. An appeal lodged in AFRINIC’s name without authority failed on 15 October 2024.

In 2025 the Court ordered AFRINIC to enter us in its register of members.

It first granted an order on 4 April 2025, on the petition we had filed in 2021. Then, on 11 June 2025, on AFRINIC’s own application, it directed that AFRINIC’s register be rectified to add us as its member under section 91 of the Companies Act, and it recorded AFRINIC’s written undertaking, signed by its Receiver, to rectify its records within 15 days. The 15 days passed without rectification.

On 9 October 2026 a rule of the Supreme Court restated the order: Cloud Innovation is a Member, and the Registrar of Companies must enter it.

The Registrar’s record of AFRINIC, issued on 28 October 2026, lists us as a member from 9 October, the day of the rule. Three days after that record was issued, AFRINIC’s Receiver announced that he had demanded our removal, with copies to the Prime Minister and other officials, and he cited no court order for it. Court orders are changed in court, not by a Receiver’s letter.

Our membership rests on the Court’s orders, and every one of them is published here with its document.

What we have won for ourselves we ask for every member: no network put out at a registry’s discretion, addresses that stay with the networks that run on them, a Board the members elect and a register every eligible member is on. The whole record, decision by decision, is in the Public Record.