On 1 October 2025, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal called me for what became a long interview about AFRINIC, the political economy of Internet number resources, and the way registry crises can be exploited by actors with money, lawyers, and media infrastructure. I spoke for roughly 2 hours over 1 and 2 October. I did so because I believed a complex institutional crisis deserved careful reporting, and because I have spent years in the African and global Internet governance ecosystem watching how decisions taken in obscure corners of the technical stack can reshape sovereignty, markets, and rights.

During that interview, I explained why AFRINIC’s paralysis is not a local administrative problem but a systemic vulnerability for the global registry model. I described how narrative pressure, litigation, and proxy activism were converging. I pointed to the way AFRINIC’s crisis was already being reframed as a morality play about markets and corruption, instead of what it also is, a struggle over stewardship of scarce resources and over the legitimacy of an African institution that sits inside a global trust architecture.

After the call, I followed up in writing. I clarified my position in the ecosystem and corrected how some of my remarks were being characterised in preliminary exchanges. I did this for one reason. In the AFRINIC story, technical nuance is not an academic detail. It is the difference between stewardship and expropriation, between compliance and coercion, between legitimate reform and opportunistic capture.

When the Journal published “The Battle Over Africa’s Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses” on 1 December 2025, my contribution was, in substance, absent. There were no direct quotations from my interview. Almost none of the context I had provided survived into the published narrative. I cannot claim to know the editorial intent behind that choice. I can document the result. A 2-hour interview produced a story in which my voice was effectively missing.

That omission would be a private disappointment if it were only about me. It is not. It matters because, in the AFRINIC crisis, the information environment is itself contested terrain. When a major newspaper publishes an authoritative-sounding account, it becomes a reference point for regulators, judges, donors, and technical community actors. It shapes the questions that are later asked and the answers that later seem plausible.

In the weeks that followed, the story circulated widely in Africa. It was discussed in WhatsApp groups, policy mailing lists, and private briefings. For a period, it also circulated beyond the Journal’s paywall through alternative distribution and reposting. A public Slashdot discussion pointed readers to a non-paywalled syndication link. I have archived screenshots and exchanges that show how widely it travelled before the paywall hardened. Those materials are on file with me.

AFRINIC’s crisis is usually described as a courtroom drama in Mauritius and a governance failure inside a registry. That description is incomplete. What I have observed, and what the documentary record increasingly supports, is the growth of a parallel campaign in the information space. It uses proxy advocacy, industrial content production, and legal pressure to shape perceptions about AFRINIC and to normalise a worldview in which Africa’s number resources can be treated as liquid inventory in a global market.

Why the information war matters

AFRINIC is one of the 5 Regional Internet Registries that collectively operate the global Internet Numbers Registry System. Its technical function is familiar to this readership. It allocates and registers IPv4, IPv6, and Autonomous System Numbers for Africa and the Indian Ocean. Its political function is less often stated plainly. It is one of the few pieces of critical digital infrastructure where Africa still has a regionally grounded institution, built through multistakeholder practice, with a mandate that is both operational and normative.

Scarcity turned that mandate into a prize. AFRINIC has long been under allocated compared with early Internet regions, and the global exhaustion of IPv4 gave every remaining block a price. The crisis around Cloud Innovation Ltd made that reality impossible to ignore. AFRINIC has publicly stated that Cloud Innovation was allocated 6.2 million IPv4 addresses between 2013 and 2016 and that the dispute escalated after AFRINIC sought to audit utilisation and enforce its Registration Services Agreement.

ARIN’s President and CEO, John Curran, described the controversy in 2021 as a saga involving “misappropriation” and reported that the overwhelming majority of the approximately 6.2 million addresses were not used within Africa and were predominantly leased to other parties. His account is detailed in ARIN’s official blog and has been cited widely in subsequent discussions.

AFRINIC’s own public records have repeatedly described Cloud Innovation as “owned and controlled by a Chinese national, Mr. Lu Heng,” and have framed the litigation as part of an effort to resist compliance enforcement and potential reclamation. Those statements appear, among other places, in AFRINIC’s Communiqué of 27 August 2022 and related materials issued by the registry.

This is where narratives become governance. The dispute is not only about whether a registry can audit and enforce. It is also about what kind of institution a registry is allowed to be. NRS and its allies have argued, in public materials, for a model where number resources become a form of property that can be freely traded, and where RIRs serve mostly as bookkeepers. The Register’s 2023 investigation describes NRS advocating for a “virtual marketplace” similar to a stock exchange and for bylaw changes that would shift the RIR role away from stewardship. The same report quotes Larus describing RIRs as bookkeepers already, and Larus marketing services that avoid “complicated RIR transfer procedure.”

If that worldview prevails through attrition, it changes more than AFRINIC. It changes the global registry order. It collapses the boundary between community policy and private commodification, and it invites a world where the integrity of registry data is negotiated through commercial pressure and litigation rather than maintained through shared norms and enforceable agreements.

That is why AFRINIC’s crisis has global significance. The RIR model rests on trust, on the boundary between stewardship and property, and on the assumption that registries can enforce their agreements without being bled into paralysis. If an actor can immobilise a registry through litigation and then dominate the information space to portray the registry as illegitimate, the contagion does not stop at AFRINIC. It reaches the credibility of the registry system itself, and therefore the legitimacy of one of the most successful decentralised governance architectures the Internet has ever built.

NRS, a proxy group with a blurred identity

In any institutional crisis, advocacy groups emerge. Some are organic. Others are vehicles. The Number Resource Society, usually presented as NRS, belongs to the second category, or at least it demands scrutiny as if it does.

AFRINIC itself has repeatedly warned members to treat NRS communications with caution. In an advisory dated 9 July 2025, the court-appointed Receiver stated that AFRINIC had “no affiliation” with NRS, did not endorse its claims about elections or governance, and urged members to be vigilant when approached to sign a Power of Attorney that would delegate voting or decision-making authority.

NRS presents itself as a public interest society advocating for reform. Its own website frames its mission around “decentralized governance” and frequently invokes market-based arguments about IPv4 and the registry model. It also operates an online media operation. The NRS video library lists 45 videos, many of them dedicated to AFRINIC, its elections, and its staff. Volume alone is not wrongdoing. But volume is a strategy. A steady stream of videos, blog posts, and web pages can create the appearance of a movement and can dominate search visibility, especially in a niche domain where few mainstream outlets publish consistently.

Public reporting has also placed NRS inside the same corporate gravity field as the litigants. In June 2021, while AFRINIC and Cloud Innovation were already engaged in legal conflict, an unknown entity registered the domain name nrs.help. The Register reports that an Internet Archive snapshot of the site in September 2021 listed a Hong Kong address that matched that of Larus Limited, whose CEO is Lu Heng. The same report records that the NRS began campaigning against AFRINIC soon afterwards, including allegations on AFRINIC’s forums that members were contacted with warnings that the registry would close and they should join the society instead.

The Register also documents how NRS’s rhetoric moved from critique to spectacle. It notes that in 2022, the society started publishing videos that claimed, among other things, that AFRINIC could “destroy the entire internet” and that AFRINIC had “sovereign power” over the world’s network. In correspondence with the outlet, NRS reportedly objected to suggestions that such language was exaggerated. The problem with this style of messaging is not only that it inflames. It is that it reframes contractual compliance as authoritarian control and casts a registry’s enforcement obligations as an illegitimate threat.

The same investigation records another revealing detail. It describes NRS advocating for a future where internet service providers “outright own” IP addresses and can freely trade them, while RIRs merely ensure no duplication and correct registration. This is not a marginal policy tweak. It is an attempt to redesign the philosophical foundations of the registry system. It is also a policy outcome that would conveniently make disputes like AFRINIC’s enforcement action against Cloud Innovation “moot,” in The Register’s words, because stewardship constraints would vanish into property rights.

The Register’s reporting goes further. It notes that NRS’s site once contained a Larus Foundation email address as a contact and that LinkedIn profiles showed overlapping employment between Larus Foundation and NRS during NRS’s start-up period. It records NRS’s explanation that Larus provided a website template. Even if one accepts that explanation, it still places the proxy group’s infrastructure inside the orbit of the same actor whose commercial interests are at the centre of the registry conflict.

In 2025, my own inquiry into NRS added a more mundane but telling data point. A court bailiff report obtained in Casablanca, dated 29 July 2025, records an attempt to locate the organisation at the address it had publicly associated with itself, 133 Boulevard Ziraoui. The bailiff reported that no sign or information indicated the presence of NRS at that address. That report is on file with me.

None of these elements, taken alone, proves illegality. Together, they describe a pattern that Internet governance professionals have seen before. A civic brand appears during a high-stakes institutional crisis. It produces content at scale. It encourages members to delegate authority through powers of attorney. It advances a policy worldview aligned with the commercial beneficiary of the crisis. It operates through an identity structure that is difficult to verify in the jurisdictions it cites. The point is not to criminalise advocacy. The point is to see the mechanism clearly.

Lu Heng’s media brand owned by an interested party

The most consequential narrative engine in this ecosystem is not NRS. It is a media platform that openly discloses ownership by the same corporate universe that is litigating and lobbying around AFRINIC.

Blue Tech Wave Media, known as BTW.Media, publishes a large volume of content about AFRINIC. It is not an external outlet observing a crisis from a distance. Its pages repeatedly state, in plain language, that “BTW.MEDIA is proudly owned by LARUS Ltd,” a company associated with Lu Heng. That disclosure appears at the bottom of its AFRINIC-related articles, including this one.

BTW’s own site taxonomy gives a sense of scale. In the categories list published on its pages, the “AFRINIC” category shows 406 posts, alongside dedicated subcategories such as “AFRINIC Crisis” and “AFRINIC Analysis.” That single number is a map of a strategy. Few African media houses, and even fewer international technology desks, have published 406 separate pieces on AFRINIC. In a niche technical controversy, that level of output can flood search results and shape what journalists, policymakers, and judges encounter when they try to understand the issue.

The AFRINIC category itself runs across dozens of pages, visible here, and covers everything from board elections to legal filings to arguments for dissolving AFRINIC. The editorial technique is consistent. A court order is reported without context from the wider docket. A governance dispute is described as terminal corruption rather than a contest between incompatible interpretations of stewardship. AFRINIC’s internal weaknesses are real and documented, including past corruption that AFRINIC itself acknowledged through audits. But they are repeatedly used as a narrative lever to suggest that the registry should be reset in ways that would also transform the economics of Africa’s number resources.

The point is not to police opinion. BTW is free to advocate. The problem arises when advocacy is packaged as news while being funded and owned by the beneficiary of the advocacy. That is a classic influence structure. It resembles what other policy domains would call sponsored content, except here the sponsorship is structural rather than transactional.

BTW’s influence is not limited to text. The brand’s social footprint includes video distribution. Its YouTube channel lists 59 videos. Video is more easily shared across messaging apps. It compresses complex institutional issues into a storyline. It also travels well across linguistic boundaries, which matters in Africa’s multilingual policy environment.

The most underappreciated effect of this output is search dominance. When an analyst searches for “AFRINIC election,” “AFRINIC court,” “AFRINIC corruption,” or “AFRINIC Lu Heng,” the results are not neutral. They are shaped by the number of pages, their internal linking, their repetition of key terms, and the fact that few independent outlets publish comparable volume. This is not speculation. It is the basic mechanics of discoverability in a digital public sphere.

How legitimacy is laundered

Internet governance communities are familiar with the way legitimacy can be manufactured. It rarely comes from one decisive publication. It comes from iterative citation loops.

A claim appears first on a platform controlled by an interested actor. It is then echoed by a proxy group, framed as civic concern, and pushed through sympathetic commentaries. A larger outlet encounters the claim, treats it as part of the background noise, and includes it as context. The interested actor then cites the larger outlet as independent confirmation, even when the outlet’s reporting was itself partially built on the original narrative. That is how influence becomes durable without ever requiring a single document that proves coordination.

NRS’s own materials illustrate the technique. The Register notes that in June 2023, NRS published a document defending Cloud Innovation’s actions and arguing that Cloud Innovation’s demand for IPv4 allowed AFRINIC to secure rights to another 10 million IPv4 addresses from IANA. That is an extraordinary claim. The Register reported it could find no other instance in which NRS used a private entity’s plight to illustrate its arguments. This is how private interest is repackaged as public benefit, and how a commercial dispute is reframed as a civilisational struggle against institutional tyranny.

Academic commentary can play a similar role, sometimes unintentionally. The Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech, led by Professor Milton Mueller, published “A Fight Over Crumbs: The AFRINIC Crisis” in 2021. The analysis describes the dispute as a battle over IPv4 scarcity, critiques AFRINIC’s governance weaknesses, and uses a striking phrase, “legal terrorism,” to describe the escalation into repeated litigation. I cite it here not to litigate every argument in the piece, but to note how framing matters. When the crisis is described primarily as a fight over crumbs, the underlying stakes of African institutional autonomy can disappear. That frame can be convenient for actors seeking to treat African issued number resources as a globally tradable asset rather than a regionally stewarded public interest resource.

Mainstream media coverage can then crystallise the loop. The afterlife of the Wall Street Journal story illustrates this. In March 2026, Lu Heng published a CircleID essay titled “The Poverty Penalty: How the RIR Model Taxes the Poor While Calling It Equality”. In it, he refers to the Journal as having offered a “neat version” of the moral narrative about markets and Africa. The point is not that CircleID should or should not publish his views. The point is that a mainstream newspaper article becomes a citation anchor in an argument seeking to redefine the registry system itself. A contested story becomes infrastructure for a broader ideological project.

The story’s policy afterlife can be measured in other ways. The Journal’s article was catalogued in thematic trackers of Chinese influence, including the Hoover Institution’s China’s Global Sharp Power Weekly Alert, which listed it among items relevant to China’s strategic interests abroad. That is not proof of intent or of any editorial agenda. It is evidence that a story about AFRINIC can quickly be absorbed into broader geopolitical narratives, and those narratives can then feed back into how the technical dispute is understood.

This is not unique to AFRINIC. Similar laundering dynamics appear in disputes over domain names, routing security, and content governance. What makes AFRINIC distinctive is that the information environment is thinner. African specialist reporting on technical governance is under-resourced. International outlets often arrive late. In that gap, a well-funded narrative operation can do what it wants.

When a premier newsroom becomes part of the ecosystem

The uncomfortable lesson of this crisis is that a sophisticated influence operation does not need to invent facts. It needs to select, amplify, and omit. That is why the Journal’s reporting matters.

I agreed to a long interview because I expected the Journal to test competing claims rigorously, to ground assertions in documentary evidence, and to reflect the African public interest view with the same seriousness it applied to commercial and academic arguments. I was transparent about my role. I told the reporter that I was not a resource member of AFRINIC, but that I had engaged the registry crisis through my work in the wider Internet governance community, across continental and global processes.

The published article did not meaningfully use my interview. It instead privileged the framing advanced by Lu Heng and by commentators whose analysis has been repeatedly mobilised to argue that the registry model is broken and should be redesigned toward market logic. There is nothing illegitimate about quoting Lu Heng or academics. The problem is proportionality and verification. When the person with the strongest commercial interest in a narrative is amplified, and African public interest perspective is minimised, the story’s centre of gravity shifts away from stewardship and toward extraction, even if the journalist does not intend that outcome.

The fact that the reporter was based in Africa does not solve this. It can even exacerbate risk. Africa-based correspondents operate under intense time pressure, and they often cover multiple beats. They may not have deep technical grounding in the RIR system or in the policy history of number resources. They also operate in an environment where legal intimidation is real. When a contested actor can credibly threaten litigation, it is easier, safer, and sometimes faster to quote that actor’s public statements than to reconstruct the deeper documentary record and to litigate the nuance in an editor’s inbox.

The distribution dynamics amplified the impact. The Journal story circulated in Africa for weeks beyond the constraints of a subscription wall, including through reposting and syndication routes. By the time it settled behind a paywall, it had already shaped the first round of reactions. That is how narrative capture works in practice. The story that is free is the story that becomes the record.

I have recordings of the interview and written exchanges that document what was asked, what was answered, and what was later clarified. My lawyers are taking action on that front. I am also calling on the Journal to conduct its own internal review, not as a favour to me, but as a test of journalistic method in a field increasingly targeted by sophisticated influence campaigns. When critical digital infrastructure becomes the object of strategic contestation, media organizations must treat themselves as part of the threat surface. A newsroom does not need to be corrupt to be instrumentalised. It only needs to be outpaced.

Legal threats as narrative management

A narrative operation becomes more effective when it is reinforced by legal pressure. In the AFRINIC crisis, litigation has been used to immobilise the registry itself. But legal tools have also been directed at the information space.

On 1 July 2025, Cloud Innovation’s Legal and Compliance Officer sent a cease-and-desist letter to CIO Africa and to me in relation to coverage of the dispute. The letter demanded removal of content within 24 hours, threatened an injunction, and warned that damages and legal costs would be pursued on an indemnity basis. That letter is on file with me.

In any democracy, organisations have the right to defend themselves against defamation. The problem arises when legal threats are used at scale to chill reporting, especially in contexts where newsrooms lack the resources to fight. In Africa, where many technology publications operate on thin margins and depend on access to sources, a single aggressive legal threat can shape editorial decisions. It can also push journalists toward safer narratives, including the narratives supplied by the loudest and most legally fortified actor.

The Register’s reporting on NRS contains a related clue. It notes that Cloud Innovation’s address in AFRINIC’s WhoIs was linked to an address used by Appleby Global Services in the Seychelles and explicitly states that it is not suggesting wrongdoing. The point is not offshore insinuation. The point is structural. Actors operating across jurisdictions can combine litigation, corporate structuring, and media production in ways that are difficult for under-resourced institutions and newsrooms to contest.

This is how lawfare and information warfare can reinforce each other. Courts and injunctions slow a registry’s operations and consume leadership attention. Parallel legal pressure narrows the space for critical scrutiny. Meanwhile, an owned media brand publishes at scale to fill the gap. The public sees a flood of content and assumes it reflects independent consensus. In reality, it may reflect asymmetry of resources and asymmetry of risk.

What the global community should do now

AFRINIC can recover only if the global Internet governance ecosystem treats narrative capture as a governance risk, not as background noise. The registry system was built to manage number resources, not to defend itself against industrial reputation attacks. Yet that is now part of the environment.

For journalists, the first discipline is transparency. When a media platform is owned by an interested party, its content should not be treated as neutral reporting, no matter how polished the layout or how prolific the output. Editors covering AFRINIC should treat BTW.Media’s ownership disclosure as a material fact. They should also treat proxy advocacy with caution. AFRINIC’s own warnings about NRS and powers of attorney are not a public relations gesture. They are a security signal.

For institutions, the discipline is documentation. AFRINIC has already moved in that direction by publishing public communiqués, litigation registers, and receiver updates. The other RIRs, the Number Resource Organization, and ICANN should treat the AFRINIC crisis as an early warning about how critical infrastructure institutions can be attacked through combined legal and narrative pressure. Institutional responses cannot rely solely on court filings. They need to include information hygiene, public archiving, and rapid rebuttal grounded in evidence.

For Africa, the discipline is political clarity. The answer to AFRINIC’s weakness cannot be to surrender the registry’s mission to actors whose business model depends on turning African scarcity into globally monetisable inventory. The answer must be institutional reform that strengthens compliance, governance integrity, and member participation while reaffirming the public interest stewardship logic that justified an African registry in the first place.

The global question is whether the Internet registry system remains a governance architecture built on trust, contractual responsibility, and community policy, or whether it becomes another domain where power is decided by whoever can litigate longest and publish loudest. AFRINIC is where that question has become impossible to avoid.