Africa’s Internet wealth threatened by lawsuits and corruption

Foreigners have long taken advantage of Africa’s gold, diamonds and even the wealth of men. Digital resources turned out to be no different.

Millions of Internet addresses assigned to Africa have been hijacked, some fraudulently, including insiders linked to a former senior employee of a non-profit union that provides addresses on the continent. Rather than serving the growth of the Internet in Africa, many have benefited from spammers and crooks, while others are satisfying the Chinese appetite for pornography and gambling.

The new management of the non-profit consortium, AFRINIC, is working to recover the lost addresses. But the legal challenge by a Chinese businessman with large pockets threatens the existence of the body.

 

The businessman is Lu Heng, an arbitration specialist based in Hong Kong. Under disputed circumstances, it received 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. This is about 5% of the continent’s total – more than Kenya.

AFRINIC made no corruption claims when it canceled Lu’s addresses, which are now worth about $150 million, saying that his company was not adequately serving the interests of Africa. Lou retaliated. His lawyers persuaded a judge in late July to freeze his bank accounts in Mauritius, where AFRICNIC is located. His company also filed a $80 million defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO.

It comes as a blow to the global networking community, which has long viewed the Internet as a technological scaffold for advancing society. Some fear it will undermine the entire digital addressing system that makes the Internet work.

“We never really thought, especially in the AFRINIC region, that someone would directly attack a fundamental piece of internet governance and try to shut it down, take it away. Packet Clearing House, a global non-profit organization Bill Woodcock, executive director of

Lu told The Associated Press that he was an honest businessman who didn’t break any rules in getting an African address block. And, defying the Internet steward’s consensus, it says its five regional registries are not required to decide where IP addresses are used.

“AFRINIC should serve the Internet, it’s not going to serve Africa,” Lu said. “They’re just accountants.

By repealing Lou’s address block, AFRINIC is attempting to reclaim critical address space for a continent that is lagging behind in accessing Internet resources to raise living standards and improve health and education. Africa received only 3% of the first generation IP addresses in the world.

Worse: the alleged theft of millions of AFRINIC IP addresses, involving the organization’s former No. 2 officer, Ernest Byruhanga, who was fired in December 2019. It is not known whether he was acting alone.

The new CEO of the registry, Eddie Kayhura, said at the time that he had filed a criminal complaint with the Mauritius Police. He shook the management and started trying to grab the finer IP address blocks.

While billions of people use the Internet every day, its inner workings are poorly understood and rarely come under scrutiny. Globally, five fully autonomous regional organizations, operating as non-profit public trusts, decide who owns and operates a limited store of the Internet’s first-generation IP address blocks. Is. Established in 2003, AFRINIC was the last of five registries to be created.

Just ten years ago, 3.7 billion first generation IP addresses, known as IPv4, were completely eliminated in the developed world. These IP addresses now auction for between $20 and $30 each.

The current crisis arose from the discovery of an alleged fraud at AFRINIC. The hijacking of 4 million IP addresses by Bayahuranga and possibly others, worth more than $50 million, was discovered by Ron Gilmette, an independent Internet detective in California, and uncovered by him and Jan Vermeulen, a reporter for the South African tech website MyBroadband. Was. Byahuranga is believed to have lived in his native Uganda, but he could not be traced for comment.

Adil Akplogan, AFRINIC’s CEO from 2003 to 2015, told the AP that he was unknown at the time Byahuranga hijacked the alleged address.

“I don’t know how he did it,” said a Togolese Akplogan, who is currently vice president of technical engagement at ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the California body that oversees global network addresses and domains. Name of the companies “And those who know the reality of my management of AFRINIC know full well that this is not something I will know and I will let it be.”

The ownership of at least 675,000 ecclesiastical addresses is in dispute. Some are controlled by an Israeli businessman, who sued AFRINIC to try to get them back.

Many continue to host websites with controversial addresses such as absurd URL names, including gambling and pornography aimed at Chinese audiences.