Cloud Innovation and AFRINIC: straight answers

No.

AFRINIC registered every address we hold, through its own process, to a member it has had since 2013. The complaint of AFRINIC’s management against us was never theft: it was about how AFRINIC’s own rules should be read. The addresses that were found taken without justification were taken inside AFRINIC, whose own audit, published in 2021, found 2,371,584 IPv4 addresses “misappropriated from AFRINIC’s pool of resources and attributed to organisations without justification”. An IP address is a number in a record, and registering one takes nothing from Africa.

No.

The accusations of AFRINIC’s management rested on its own misreading of its policies and of how routing works, as our reply of 13 July 2020 explained. Eight months later, on the first day of a national lockdown in Mauritius, “when access to justice was very limited”, it gave us 30 days to answer what the Court later called “purported breaches”, or face termination at its “sole discretion”. The Court restrained AFRINIC from terminating our membership.

Yes.

We have been a Resource Member of AFRINIC since 2013, and the Supreme Court has ordered AFRINIC to enter us in its register of members as well. On 11 June 2025, on AFRINIC’s own application, the Court directed that the register be rectified to add us as its member under section 91 of the Companies Act. A rule of 9 October 2026 restates that order, and the Registrar of Companies’ record lists us on the register from that day. AFRINIC’s own communiqué of 31 October 2026 says the rule “serves to certify the outcomes” of the Court’s orders.

A category was wrong, and it was corrected.

Our place on the register is by order of the Court. In 2025 we were first listed as a “Registered Member”, the category AFRINIC’s bylaws keep for directors; a ruling of 19 June 2025, given in a case to which we were not a party, called that a “wrong classification”, and we accept that it was. The order of 11 June 2025 is a different thing: made on AFRINIC’s own application, it directs that we be entered as a member under section 91 of the Companies Act. The ruling of 19 June contains no order cancelling it, and the rule of 9 October 2026 restates it. A correction of category cannot erase an express order to record a member.

Because each of our applications answered a new move against us.

That is what the Supreme Court found on 19 July 2022, when it rejected AFRINIC’s claim that we were abusing its process: 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”. In June 2022 we offered mediation without conditions. AFRINIC’s management did not even acknowledge the offer.

A judge authorised it.

On 23 July 2021, on our application and in support of our claim for damages over the termination, the Judge in Chambers of the Commercial Division authorised us to attach up to USD 50 million held in AFRINIC’s name at two banks. That was ten days after those then running AFRINIC had “deliberately flouted” the Court’s injunction, as the judgment of 19 July 2022 records. The order is published here, word for word.

We want the registry kept running, and run lawfully.

On our application in 2023 the Supreme Court restrained AFRINIC from relocating, merging, restructuring or submitting to a takeover, and appointed a Receiver to see that elections are held under its constitution; we sought that to restore good governance at AFRINIC, never to disrupt its work. When an entire election was annulled over “one disputed proxy” and ICANN itself warned that AFRINIC’s ability to function was in jeopardy, we asked the Court for an orderly wind-up under its supervision and proposed a successor registry, so that African networks keep their registry services without interruption. What has to survive is the record the networks depend on, not the people who misused it. Our dispute is not with AFRINIC, which belongs to its members, but with those who control it.

We host nothing.

Our customers are network operators in 60 countries who keep hundreds of millions of people online. In August 2021 AFRINIC’s management wrote that websites using addresses allocated to us carried illegal content, and demanded to know why we did not monitor them, on pain of termination. We asked them to tell us within four hours which addresses were involved, so that the sites could be shut down. They refused. A registry that would not say where the abuse was had no business demanding the power to watch everyone.

Cloud Innovation Ltd is registered in Seychelles, an African state, and has been a member of AFRINIC since 2013.

It would make no difference if it were registered anywhere else: an IP address has no nationality, and neither do a member’s rights under AFRINIC’s constitution and the law of Mauritius. Those who call it foreign are talking about its founder’s passport, and a passport is not an argument.

Read the orders, not the headlines.

Since 2021 the Supreme Court of Mauritius has three times restrained AFRINIC from ending our membership, rejected its claim that we abused the Court’s process, placed it in receivership on our application, finding the orders we sought “fully justified, reasonable, and fair”, and ordered it, on its own application, to enter us in its register of members. Every one of those decisions is published here with its original document.