Who controls Africa’s internet?

No single body controls Africa’s internet, and none should.

Its networks are built and run by operators, licensed by each country’s regulator and answerable to each country’s courts. What sits in Mauritius is a registry: an address book that records who holds which IP addresses, so that no two networks use the same ones. An address book helps you find a house. It gives its keeper no claim on the city.

AFRINIC is a private company, not a public authority.

It describes itself as “a nonprofit, member-based organisation registered and operating under the Corporate Legal Frameworks of Mauritius”, and gives its mission as “To serve the African Internet community”. No treaty created it and no parliament elected it. When its management asked the Government of Mauritius, repeatedly, for the status and immunities of an international organisation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied that the request “cannot be entertained”.

AFRINIC’s members elect its Board, and in 2025 they were not left to do so freely.

The Supreme Court of Mauritius had placed AFRINIC in receivership, on our application, so that elections would be held under its constitution. In June 2025 AFRINIC’s Receiver annulled the entire election over “one disputed proxy”, “silencing hundreds of valid votes”, and his rules for the new election banned the proxy voting that Article 12.12 of that constitution allows. We do not recognise the Board that came out of the disputed election of September 2025 as lawfully constituted. Eight seats filled that way speak for no continent.

Nobody gave AFRINIC a mandate to speak for Africa.

Africa speaks through its 54 governments, its parliaments, its courts and the people who build its networks. Directors are elected to run a company, and a service region is a service area, not a nation. So whenever AFRINIC says “for Africa”, ask one thing: who gains the rights, and who gains the power?

AFRINIC cannot cut a cable, but it can strike a network’s addresses from the record the rest of the internet relies on, and it has tried.

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, on 29 March, 13 July and 3 December 2021. The proposed constitution would let the suspension and termination of members be delegated to officers, and a terminated member would still have to return its addresses. Today one thing stands between an African network and that power: a court.

The courts can, and since 2021 they have.

The Supreme Court of Mauritius has blocked AFRINIC’s resolution against our membership, restrained it from terminating that membership, placed it in receivership on our application and ordered it, on AFRINIC’s own application, to enter us in its register of members. Its judgment of 19 July 2022 records that those then running AFRINIC “deliberately flouted” a court order. A registry that answers to the courts is safe to deal with. One that asks for immunity from them is not.

Yes.

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 the company foreign are talking about its founder’s passport, and a passport is not an argument. The question they have to answer is where their own power over Africa’s networks comes from.

No one should control Africa’s internet.

Each network should be run by the people who built it, under its own country’s laws. A registry should keep an accurate record, answer to the law like any other company, let its members vote and let them leave. Those four things are what we have gone to court for since 2021, and what we have won for ourselves we ask for every member.