APRICOT 2026 After years of strife, the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is weeks away from signing off on a budget and action plan, activity that one of the organization’s newly appointed executives believes demonstrates it is back on track.
AFRINIC is one of the world’s five regional internet registries (RIRs), the governance bodies that delegate and manage IP addresses and autonomous system numbers in coordination with ICANN. A complex set of linked legal matters meant the African registry was unable to elect a board or carry out many of its functions from 2022 to 2025, but after some difficulties last year, it has elected a board and begun to rebuild.
Evidence of the turnaround emerged on Monday when Mukom Tamon, AFRINIC’s head of capacity building, appeared at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia. AFRINIC has been largely absent from such events for several years.
“We were extremely concerned that if we did not have some good news out of 2025, 2026 would the year in which our death just continues in a very silent way,” Tamon told the conference.
At APRICOT, Tamon offered lots of positive news.
He told the event that morale among AFRINIC staff has improved since the election, and that AFRINIC’s new board has swung into action. One sign of the board’s vigor, he said, is the appointment of interim management personnel – himself to cover technology infrastructure and strategy, plus a finance officer, and another exec dedicated to stakeholder engagement. Tamon said AFRINIC has also developed a budget and action plan that will appear in the next two weeks.
“That is a sign we are out of the quagmire,” he said, before predicting “This year, the phoenix rises from the ashes.”
And from 2027, AFRINIC might soar: Tamon said the organization’s board is working on a formal strategy covering the years 2027 to 2030. “That is how we get back to governance normalcy,” he told the APRICOT crowd.
Tamon also noted that AFRINIC has a pool of 773,376 unallocated IPv4 addresses and that he “can’t wait for that to be zero, so we can start talking about what really matters: IPv6.”
That remark drew a chuckle from the APRICOT crowd.
His earlier news about AFRINIC’s improved status brought spontaneous and enthusiastic applause – a rare response at a gathering mostly attended by network engineers and internet governance wonks.
Policy response
AFRINIC’s past woes left the organization unable to perform some of its basic functions, a situation that concerned internet governance organizations because the policy they operate under defines how to create an RIR, but does not include provisions for what to do if an RIR becomes dysfunctional.
The community’s response was to revisit that policy, knwon as ICP-2, so it defines the full lifecycle of an RIR, plus provisions for how the five registries can assist each other during crises. The revised ICP-2 also incudes provisions that allow derecognition of an RIR.
A second round of community consultation on the revised ICP-2 took place in late 2025, and last week the Number Resource Organization (NRO), the peak body for the five RIRs, published a summary [PDF] of comments received, plus a status report [PDF] on the process of updating ICP-2.
At APRICOT this week, Akinori Maemura, a member of the NRO’s governing council, summarized those documents by saying some work remains to more clearly define elements of the policy and then draft the revised document.
In conversation with The Register, Maemura said the revised ICP-2 is nearly in its final form, and that the document will be ready to put to a vote by the end of 2026. He said ICANN will likely approve it later this year.
If that happens, the RIR community will have used the bottom-up multistakeholder processes (which the United Nations recently decided to embrace) to strengthen its governance.
Which matters to readers of The Register because we all depend on IP addresses, and the organizations that oversee them will soon likley operate on firmer footing. ®