In almost every debate about AFRINIC, someone eventually reaches for a seemingly elegant solution. Africa should stop fighting over IPv4, they say, and simply move to IPv6. In principle, that is correct. IPv6 is the long-term solution to the address shortage, and it is essential for the continued growth of the Internet. In practice, the argument is often used as a way to dismiss the political economy of scarcity and to normalize the idea that Africa can be treated as a residual pool of legacy resources to be harvested before the future arrives. Africa cannot skip IPv4 because the Internet cannot skip IPv4, and because the costs of pretending otherwise fall most heavily on the regions that were historically underallocated.

The technical community does not need a primer on IPv6, but the policy community often does. IPv6 expands the address space dramatically and enables a cleaner end-to-end architecture. Yet the transition is not a switch. It is an extended period of coexistence, and for many networks it is a period of dual operation that can last years. Many services remain IPv4 only, many enterprise networks still depend on IPv4 tooling, and many consumer devices and customer premises equipment remain imperfect in their IPv6 support. These frictions are documented in global deployment data such as APNIC Labs IPv6 capability measurements and Google’s IPv6 adoption statistics. The transition is real, but it is uneven, and it is shaped by economics and governance as much as by protocol design.

The leapfrogging myth & Africa’s infrastructure reality

For Africa, the unevenness is amplified by the infrastructure reality. In many markets, the ISP ecosystem is dominated by small and medium operators with limited capital. Rural coverage remains expensive, backbone capacity is constrained, and energy costs are high. IPv6 deployment requires upgrades across routers, customer equipment, network management systems, security tooling, and staff training. It also requires coordination with upstreams, peering partners, government networks, and content providers. These costs are manageable when an operator has access to sufficient IPv4 during the transition. They become punitive when IPv4 scarcity forces the operator to pay market prices for addresses or to deploy increasingly complex NAT layers that degrade performance and raise compliance costs.

The idea that Africa can leapfrog directly into an IPv6-only Internet often assumes an ecosystem that does not exist. Dual stack remains the dominant operational model because it preserves universal reachability. Where IPv6 only is possible, it often depends on sophisticated translation mechanisms such as NAT64 and 464XLAT and on tight control of device profiles. Those approaches can work in large, well-resourced mobile networks. They are harder to sustain in fragmented environments where legacy devices and enterprise networks remain common. The result is that IPv4 remains a practical requirement for continuity, even for operators that are committed to IPv6.

When scarcity forces workarounds

IPv4 scarcity is already forcing technical compromises that are costly in African environments. Carrier-grade NAT can keep services online, but it introduces additional infrastructure, logging requirements, and failure points. It complicates lawful intercept and incident response because one public address may map to thousands of users and sessions. It can also degrade performance for latency-sensitive applications and for peer-to-peer services. These are not abstract concerns. They shape the everyday quality of connectivity for consumers and enterprises, and they translate directly into higher operating costs for networks that are already under financial pressure.

The security and trust implications are often overlooked. When large numbers of users share the same IPv4 address, abuse by a small subset can lead to blacklisting that affects many innocent users and businesses. This can disrupt access to banking services, developer platforms, and cloud providers that rely on reputation systems keyed to IPv4. IPv6 reduces these pathologies by restoring address abundance, but the transition period is precisely the time when shared addressing can become most intense. Adequate transitional IPv4 therefore, functions as a harm reduction measure, not as a nostalgia project.

The transition also interacts with content localization. African IXPs, data centers, and local content ecosystems have grown rapidly, but many hosting environments still depend on IPv4 availability, and many local entrepreneurs still deploy services that must be reachable via IPv4. When IPv4 becomes prohibitively expensive, local hosting can be displaced by offshore platforms that already own large legacy address pools. The result is a negative feedback loop where scarcity pushes services out of the region, which then reduces incentives to invest locally, which then slows both IPv6 uptake and broader digital ecosystem development.

Scarcity is therefore not simply a technical inconvenience. It is a development constraint. It shows up as higher barriers to entry for new ISPs, higher costs for data centers, fewer IPv4 routable services hosted locally, and deeper dependence on upstream intermediaries. When IPv4 addresses are treated as tradable assets, the scarcity premium is paid by those who arrived late to the Internet and who have the least surplus capital to absorb it. AFRINIC’s region entered the Internet era with a structurally smaller pool, and AFRINIC has itself acknowledged this imbalance, noting that Africa holds less than 6% of global IPv4 in its Communiqué on the AFRINIC court cases.

The political economy of the IPv4 market

The secondary market magnifies asymmetry. In principle, transfer markets can reallocate resources from those who do not need them to those who do. In practice, markets also attract speculative behavior. Address blocks become investments, leasing portfolios, and collateral. The incentives of investors are not aligned with universal access or with equitable transition. They are aligned with scarcity persistence. When a region’s remaining pool is captured by actors who monetize scarcity globally, the region pays twice. It loses capacity to support local growth, and it becomes a price taker in a market it did not design.

The exhaustion of AFRINIC’s free pool is not theoretical. AFRINIC has operated under a soft landing framework for years, and public announcements have described the registry’s move into the final phase of IPv4 availability, including the last /11. An example of such public communication is the post IPv4 exhaustion AFRINIC has reached the last /11. Once a registry reaches this phase, the policy space narrows. Small allocations remain possible, but large growth requirements increasingly depend on transfers, waiting lists, or secondary market access.

This is where the economics become unavoidable. IPv4 prices have risen over time as scarcity deepened, and market reports regularly note multi-dollar per address valuations depending on block size and provenance. Price points shift, but the structural fact is stable. Scarcity converts a coordination resource into a revenue-bearing asset. ARIN’s analysis of the AFRINIC crisis explicitly acknowledges the economic incentives created by scarcity and the way those incentives interact with litigation and policy disputes in AFRINIC and the Stability of the Internet Number Registry System.

When Africa is told to ignore IPv4 and accelerate IPv6, the advice often ignores this transitional market reality. In an ideal world, IPv6 deployment would be universal, and the market would not matter. In the real world, the market shapes who can grow and who cannot. Large global actors with legacy IPv4 can expand and absorb transition costs. Smaller African operators face both equipment upgrade costs and address acquisition costs. The difference is not simply technical capacity. It is financial leverage.

There is also a regulatory dimension. Many African regulators are still adapting their frameworks to an IPv6 future, and many national strategies focus on broadband coverage, competition, and consumer pricing rather than on protocol transition. Yet transition outcomes are shaped by procurement standards, public sector network requirements, and the incentives regulators create for operators. If public contracts and universal service programs do not include IPv6 readiness requirements, then IPv6 deployment will remain patchy, and IPv4 dependence will last longer. The result is a longer period in which Africa needs transitional IPv4 capacity to avoid stagnation.

This is why the AFRINIC crisis cannot be separated from the broader debate about the commercialization of number resources. The Cloud Innovation case illustrates how scarcity and institutional weakness intersect. AFRINIC and ARIN’s public documentation describe how 6.2 million IPv4 addresses allocated by AFRINIC to Cloud Innovation were, in ARIN’s technical assessment, overwhelmingly routed outside Africa. ARIN’s analysis is detailed in AFRINIC and the Stability of the Internet Number Registry System, and AFRINIC’s account of the associated litigation is in its Litigation FAQ.

I do not cite this case to imply that any cross-border use is illegitimate. I cite it because as explained in my previous publication, it reveals the developmental risk when Africa’s scarce IPv4 is turned into a global leasing reservoir. The argument that Africa should simply move to IPv6 becomes a rhetorical shield for that extraction. It implies that the remaining IPv4 pool no longer matters for African development, even though African networks remain dependent on IPv4 reachability during the transition. It shifts the moral burden away from those who benefit from scarcity and onto those who bear its costs.

When advocacy aligns with scarcity rents

Lu Heng has positioned himself not only as a market actor but also as a governance reform advocate. His arguments about number resource ownership and decentralization are promoted through platforms including the Number Resource Society website, which describes itself as a non-profit membership organization campaigning for organizations to own IP assets. The site prominently links to his essays, including an essay hosted at heng.lu that frames registry discretion as economic power and argues for decentralization. These arguments should be engaged seriously, because they reflect a real tension in the registry system. Scarcity has created economic value, and that value creates political pressure.

Yet the reform discourse often slides into a normalization of asset logic that is incompatible with the original stewardship model. This is visible in the language of ownership, digital gold, and investment opportunity. It is also visible in the media ecosystem that has emerged around the IPv4 market. For example, Blue Tech Wave Media promotes a free ebook titled IP Addresses: The New Digital Gold and presents itself as a major tech news platform. Its own website states that it is owned by LARUS Ltd and it is accessible through develop.btw.media. The platform has published extensive coverage of AFRINIC and has hosted interviews with Lu Heng under the Blue Tech Wave Media label on YouTube. The point is not that advocacy is illegitimate. The point is that advocacy and commercial incentives can align in ways that reshape governance norms without transparent accountability.

The global audience should recognize what is happening here. An address market actor can simultaneously benefit from scarcity and promote a governance philosophy that treats addresses as assets whose allocation should be less constrained by regional policy. If that philosophy becomes dominant, the remaining IPv4 pools in underallocated regions become the feedstock for global portfolios. Africa is then told to accept the outcome and to accelerate IPv6, even as the transition costs increase because IPv4 has been converted into a rent stream controlled elsewhere. That is not a transition plan. It is a scarcity tax.

A pragmatic transition agenda

A realistic transition strategy must therefore be dual. It must accelerate IPv6 deployment while also protecting sufficient IPv4 capacity for continuity and growth during migration. That means investing in training, procurement standards, and IPv6 first network design. It also means resisting governance outcomes that allow the remaining IPv4 in underallocated regions to be drained through opaque transfers, leasing, or litigation. The AFRINIC region’s policy community has a legitimate interest in designing rules that prevent speculative hoarding and prioritize operational need. Those rules can be debated and refined, but they cannot be abandoned under pressure without imposing developmental harm.

The global community also has responsibilities. Other regions should not treat AFRINIC as a convenient exhaustion valve for the world. Registry coordination bodies should clarify norms on out-of-region use, leasing, and enforcement so that scarcity does not become a litigation playground. The multistakeholder system should strengthen dispute resolution mechanisms that do not require paralyzing a registry through court actions, a risk that AFRINIC and the NRO have both described publicly in the Litigation FAQ and the NRO letter to Mauritius.

A pragmatic transition agenda therefore, requires policy and operational measures that treat IPv4 as a transitional necessity and IPv6 as a strategic imperative. On the IPv6 side, governments and regulators can accelerate adoption by requiring IPv6 support in public procurement, by supporting training and certification, and by encouraging local content and peering ecosystems that reduce dependence on legacy IPv4-only paths. AFRINIC and partner initiatives have long provided training and capacity building in the region, and strengthening those efforts is one of the most direct ways to reduce IPv4 dependence over time.

On the IPv4 side, the goal should not be to preserve IPv4 indefinitely. The goal should be to prevent extractive scarcity rents during the migration period. That implies stronger transparency around leasing and reallocation practices, careful enforcement of registry policy intent, and community debate about how to balance cross-border operations with regional development needs. AFRINIC’s public documentation of litigation, including its Litigation FAQ, shows how vulnerable a registry can become when enforcement is met with litigation that targets institutional survival. Strengthening registry resilience is therefore part of transition planning.

Finally, the global technical community should resist framing IPv6 deployment as a justification for draining the remaining IPv4 pools in underallocated regions. IPv6 is not a moral escape hatch. It is a technical evolution that must be implemented under conditions of fairness. A just transition recognizes that Africa needs IPv4 capacity now to maintain growth and interoperability, and it recognizes that the most effective way to secure the IPv6 future is to prevent scarcity from being weaponized into a long-term barrier to African digital development.

Above all, the IPv6 future must not be built on a quiet acceptance that Africa will pay the highest transitional costs. Africa cannot skip IPv4 because the global Internet still depends on it, because transition requires coexistence, and because fairness requires acknowledging the historical and economic conditions under which scarcity has become an extractive instrument. If we want IPv6 to be the future of an open and inclusive Internet, then the governance of IPv4 during the transition must also be inclusive, accountable, and resistant to commodification that undermines development.