The Internet’s Address Book and Why “Digital Sovereignty” Is a Dangerous Fantasy

The Internet is often discussed as if it were territory that can be owned, controlled, or conquered. This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

A useful analogy is a city. Every house needs an address so that people, mail, and services can reach it. On the Internet, computers and networks are the houses, and IP addresses are those addresses. As the city grows, someone must maintain a neutral address book—simply recording which number is in use and by whom, so traffic can reach its destination.

That is the only function of Regional Internet Registries. AFRINIC, in Africa’s case, is nothing more than that: an address book.

The keeper of an address book does not own the houses.

It does not control the streets.

It does not command the residents.

It records numbers.

Once this is understood, the rhetoric of “digital sovereignty” collapses. The idea that controlling the African Internet can be achieved by controlling AFRINIC is equivalent to believing that stealing a telephone directory gives you power over all telephone calls. It is not only wrong; it is conceptually childish.

AFRINIC does not operate the Internet. It does not control countries, networks, or users. It functions only because networks voluntarily cooperate with a neutral registry. The moment it ceases to be neutral, it ceases to be trusted—and therefore ceases to function.

This distinction matters because in recent years there have been attempts to politicize AFRINIC under the banner of “digital sovereignty.” The phrase sounds powerful, but it describes a fantasy. Africa is not one political entity. It consists of 54 sovereign states with divergent legal systems, conflicting interests, and, in many cases, open geopolitical hostility between them. The idea that such a continent could accept a centralized “supreme digital authority” is detached from reality.

More importantly, the Internet itself is structurally incompatible with that vision. It was designed to be decentralized, permissionless, and resilient precisely because no single actor can control it. Trying to impose vertical political control over an address registry does not create sovereignty; it destroys trust. And without trust, the Internet fragments.

Our involvement in AFRINIC followed this logic, not a political agenda. When IP addresses serving hundreds of millions of end users were threatened with revocation without a legal basis, the problem was not strategic but a matter of preventing harm. When AFRINIC entered a governance vacuum, the problem was not power but institutional survival. And when political influence began interfering with court-ordered neutrality, the issue became constitutional: separation of powers is not optional if an institution wants to remain credible.

AFRINIC can exist only as a neutral librarian. The moment it is treated as a tool of state ambition or continental domination, it becomes useless to the very networks it is supposed to serve.

The Internet is not governed by decree.

It is not built by force.

And “digital sovereignty” is not achieved by politicizing an address book.

The Internet works because no one owns it. AFRINIC works only if it remembers that.