Own your IP

The network that runs on it does.

That network puts its capital, its engineers, its contracts and its customers on the address, and it alone carries the loss if the address is taken away. The registry does none of this: it records which network holds which numbers, so that no two networks use the same ones. A land registry records every title deed and holds none of them. The same is true here: the deed is the network’s, and the registry keeps the book.

AFRINIC’s contract says the addresses are not yours.

Every network that registers with AFRINIC signs its Registration Service Agreement, and in it has to acknowledge that the number resources “are not property (real, personal or intellectual)”. If the agreement ends, “AFRINIC will immediately revoke the number resources” and stop its services “without incurring any liability whatsoever”. The contract is AFRINIC’s own form, and AFRINIC is the only registry a network in Africa may use: sign it, or have no addresses. That is the keeper of the book writing its own name on every deed.

The same contract puts a price on getting it wrong: a hundred dollars.

Under it, AFRINIC’s liability to a member is “the greater of the amount paid by The Applicant to AFRINIC during the six months immediately preceding the event giving rise to such liability or 100 USD”. A registry can strike out the addresses a network runs on, with every customer behind them, and owe at most six months of fees. Power that costs a hundred dollars to misuse will be misused.

This is not a theory: it was tried on us.

In 2021 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. Three times the Judge in Chambers stopped it. The order of 13 July 2021 restrained AFRINIC from freezing or reclaiming the addresses, and the order of 3 December 2021 from terminating our membership until the dispute is finally determined. What stood between those networks and the clause was a court.

Owning your addresses means four things.

That lawfully held addresses are securely yours; that you may go on using them; that you may transfer them; and that you may take them to another registry. These are what we have asked for since 2021, for ourselves and for every member, and they are distinct from membership: a network’s place in a registry and its ownership of its addresses are two different rights. In Lu Heng’s Bill of Rights, a registry “may record”, “may coordinate” and “may protect uniqueness”. “It may not rule.”

Any network can put three questions to its registry.

None of them needs a lawyer.

1. Can you take away the addresses my network runs on?
2. If you take them wrongly, what do you owe me?
3. If I leave, do my addresses come with me?

At AFRINIC the answers are: yes, at once; a hundred dollars; and no. Own your IP.