Own your IP: three questions to ask your registry

Your network runs on its addresses. You obtained them, you built your service on them, your customers reach you through them, and you alone carry the loss if they are taken away. The addresses a network runs on belong to that network. Own your IP.

Who owns an IP address?

The network that runs on it. A registry writes down which network holds which numbers, so that no two networks use the same ones. That is an address book, and whoever keeps the address book of a city does not own the city. A land registry records every title deed and holds none of them. The deed is yours. The registry keeps the book.

Being the only registry in a region changes one thing: the duty. A provider you cannot replace owes you more care, not less.

What AFRINIC’s contract says

AFRINIC’s contract says the opposite. Every network it serves has to sign its Registration Service Agreement, and in it has to accept that the number resources it runs on “are not property (real, personal or intellectual)”. If the agreement ends, “AFRINIC will immediately revoke the number resources and otherwise cease providing the services without incurring any liability whatsoever”.

And if AFRINIC is wrong? The same contract caps what it owes you at “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”. Your customers, your contracts and everything you built on those addresses, for a hundred dollars. The keeper of the book has written its own name on every deed.

“IP for Africa” is a promise

AFRINIC states its mission in its own words: “To serve the African Internet community”. The 1992 document that proposed regional registries gave the reason for having them: a registry close to its networks “may be better able to serve the local community in terms of language and local customs”. Regions were drawn to serve networks. “IP for Africa” is that promise: the networks AFRINIC serves get the addresses they need, and own the ones they run on.

Those who control AFRINIC read the slogan backwards, as Africa for AFRINIC. Lu Heng answers them in IP for Africa, Not Africa for AFRINIC, and Cloud Innovation sets out the case in IP for Africa. Not Africa for AFRINIC. A promise to serve networks is not a deed in the hands of whoever runs the registry this year. AFRINIC belongs to its members.

It has already been tried

In 2021 AFRINIC’s management, and then its Board, moved to end the membership of one of its members, Cloud Innovation. That would have taken back the addresses its customers’ networks run on: operators in 60 countries who keep hundreds of millions of people online. Three times the Judge in Chambers of the Supreme Court of Mauritius stopped it: on 29 March, on 13 July, with an order restraining AFRINIC from freezing or reclaiming the addresses, and on 3 December, with an order restraining it from ending the membership until the dispute is finally determined. The orders are in Cloud Innovation’s public record.

A court order was all that stood between those networks and the clause. Your network signed the same contract.

A member who cannot leave

In February 2026 AFRINIC ratified a transfer policy under which “AFRINIC-issued IPv4 cannot be transferred out of the region”. AFRINIC’s own assessment of the proposal says what that is worth to AFRINIC: it “will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs in outgoing transfers”. A network that cannot take its addresses elsewhere is not being served. It is being kept.

What owning means

Four things. The addresses you lawfully hold are securely yours. You may go on using them. You may transfer them. You may take them to another registry. A registry is there to record who holds what and to keep every number unique. NRS exists to win these rights for every operator, under every registry.

Three questions for your registry

Put three questions to your registry, in writing. 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 contract has already answered: yes, at once; a hundred dollars; and no. Ask anyway, and keep the reply. A registry that will not answer the networks that pay for it has answered them.

Cloud Innovation, the member AFRINIC tried to put out, has published its own answers in Own your IP. Read them, send your three questions, and tell NRS what your registry says. One operator asking is a complaint. Operators asking together change who holds the power.