Industry players on both sides of a conflict involving the registry have welcomed the Mauritian Supreme Court’s latest ruling, as it potentially creates a path to reconstitute the ailing entity’s board and appoint a CEO. Headquartered in Mauritius, AFRINIC found itself on the wrong side of the country’s corporate governance laws after repeatedly ignoring warnings from its members and community about the danger. It also disregarded judgments on some occasions, with the courts warning AFRINIC that it was in danger of being held in contempt. The blow that finally left Afrinic without a quorate board and ultimately without a CEO was struck by Crystal Web, a defunct Internet Service Provider that used to offer consumer DSL and fibre broadband in South Africa. Although Crystal Web landed the paralysing hit, it was hardly the primary litigant in the over 55 court cases brought against AFRINIC since June 2020.

This event is another step on the path towards global exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 addressing space. In recent years, we have seen the emergence of an IPv4 transfer market and greater use of Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) in our region. There are costs and trade-offs with both approaches and neither one solves the underlying problem, which is that there are not enough IPv4 addresses for everyone.

Without wide-scale IPv6 deployment, we risk heading into a future where the growth of our Internet is unnecessarily limited — not by a lack of skilled network engineers, technical equipment or investment — but by a shortage of unique network identifiers. There is still a long way to go, and we call on all stakeholders to play their role in supporting the IPv6 roll-out.