Note 2: The online address book and why "digital sovereignty" is a dangerous fantasy.

The Internet is often discussed as a territory that can be owned, controlled or conquered. That's a fundamental misunderstanding.

A useful analogy is that of a town. Each house needs an address so that people, mail and services can get to them. On the Internet, computers and networks are houses, and IP addresses are those addresses. As the town grows, someone should maintain a neutral address book - simply by registering what number and by whom, traffic can reach their destination.

That's the only function of Regional Internet Records. AFRINIC , for Africa, is nothing but that: an address book.

The guardian of an address book doesn't own houses.

He doesn't control the streets.

Don't command the residents.

He's picking up number.

Once this is understood, the rhetoric of "digital sovereignty" crumbles. The idea that you can control the African Internet by monitoring AFRINIC is equivalent to believing that robbing a phone guide gives you power over all phone calls. It's not only wrong but conceptually childish.

AFRINIC doesn't have an Internet operation. It does not control countries, networks or users. It works only because networks voluntarily cooperate with a neutral registry. The moment it stops being neutral, it stops being reliable - and so it stops functioning.

That distinction was important because in recent years there had been attempts to politicize AFRINIC under the banner of "digital sovereignty." That phrase sounds powerful but describes a fantasy. Africa is not a single political entity. It consists of 54 sovereign states with divergent legal systems, conflicting interests and, in many cases, open geopolitical hostility among them. The idea that such a continent can accept a centralized "supreme digital authority" is disconnected from reality.

More important, the Internet itself is structurally incompatible with that vision. It was designed to be decentralized, without permits and resilient, precisely because no single actor can control it. Trying to enforce vertical political control over an address registry does not create sovereignty and destroys confidence. And without confidence, the Internet gets broken up.

Our participation at AFRINIC followed this logic, and not a political agenda. When IP addresses serving hundreds of millions of end users were threatened with a non-legal revocation, the problem was not strategic but damage prevention. When AFRINIC entered a governance vacuum, the problem was not about power but about institutional survival. And when political influence began to interferes with court-ordered neutrality, the problem became constitutional: separation of powers isn't optional if an institution wants to be credible.

AFRINIC can only exist as a neutral librarian. At the time that they are treated as a tool of state ambition or continental domination, they become useless for their own networks to serve.

The Internet isn't governed by decree.

It's not built by force.

And "digital sovereignty" cannot be achieved by politicizing an address book.

The Internet works because nobody owns them. AFRINIC only works if you remember that.