Further letter to ICANN

ICANN’s Role in the Smart Africa Blueprint and the Legitimacy Questions Raised

Subject: On ICANN’s Role in the Smart Africa Blueprint and the Legitimacy Questions Raised

Dear Kurt,

I read your letter of 24 November, Thank you.

While I appreciate the effort to clarify ICANN’s involvement in Smart Africa’s Internet Governance Blueprint, your response raises deeper concerns about institutional legitimacy, transparency, and the evolving boundaries of ICANN’s authority, rather than settling the concerns I have been communicating during and since ICANN Dublin.

Your letter attempts to draw a line between ICANN’s funding of the “Blueprint” and the “CAIGA” governance model it contains, but the relationship is not so easily disentangled.

When ICANN, the body most symbolically and operationally associated with the global DNS and the stability of unique identifiers, funds a regional initiative that produces a “governance blueprint” touching the structure of an RIR, that act itself creates meaning, expectations, signals and It creates consequences.

And those consequences cannot be minimized (after the fact) by saying ICANN “did not intend it.”

In Internet governance, intent is not the primary determinant of legitimacy, process is.

Alas, the process here is troubling.

1. Funding a governance-affecting deliverable without oversight is not a procedural accident; it is institutional drift.

Your letter states that ICANN:

• funded the Smart Africa Blueprint,

• did not evaluate the governance implications of CAIGA, and

• did not anticipate that a new RIR governance model would emerge.

These admissions reveal a governance problem far larger than CAIGA itself.

When ICANN enters a formal agreement with an intergovernmental body and finances work that touches the structure of a Regional Internet Registry, it crosses a boundary that has historically protected the legitimacy of the RIR system. That boundary is the separation between technical coordination and political institutional design.

By funding this Blueprint without internal review or safeguards, ICANN signaled, intentionally or not, that African Internet governance could be reimagined through an intergovernmental channel with ICANN’s imprimatur.

This is institutional drift in its purest form.

2. The CAIGA model is, on its face, inconsistent with the core principles of ICP-2.

You write that it is “not clear” whether CAIGA meets ICP-2. This ambiguity is unnecessary.

A governance structure that proposes:

• direct governmental involvement in RIR leadership,

• A recommendation or oversight mechanism routed through political entities,

• paid representation replacing open stakeholder participation,

does not satisfy any reasonable interpretation of ICP-2’s requirement for open, bottom-up participation, independence from governments and commercial interests, and community-driven oversight, most importantly accountability.

If ICANN believes otherwise, it should say so explicitly.

If ICANN agrees that the CAIGA model contradicts ICP-2, it should also say so explicitly.

Legitimacy depends on clarity.

3. Inviting governments to reshape RIR governance through an ICP-2 revision is an extraordinarily dangerous precedent.

The most concerning part of your letter is the suggestion that: “If the communities wish to allow direct governmental involvement… now is the time to raise it in the ICP-2 conversation.”

This implicitly opens the door for governments or intergovernmental bodies to influence or restructure RIR governance by capturing an ICANN-adjacent policy process.

This is not how legitimacy is constructed, It is how legitimacy is lost.

ICP-2 is a safeguard precisely because it limits political intervention. Redirecting governance redesign into that process, at the moment when a political blueprint has already been introduced, risks turning a technical criteria document into a political battleground.

Honestly, This is not a neutral suggestion, It is a structural pivot and the implications extend far beyond AFRINIC.

4. ICANN’s transparency deficit remains unaddressed.

Your letter does not answer the central questions:

Why were the MoU limits and authority, minutes of meetings and Project Agreement not published?

Why was the community not informed prior to AIS2024?

Why were governance implications not reviewed before the Blueprint was presented publicly?

Why must the community “reach out to Smart Africa” for basic information about a project that ICANN funded? SmartAfrica doesn’t respond to anyone BTW

The fact that these documents remain undisclosed indicates a legitimacy gap.

Transparency is not an afterthought; it is the foundation of multistakeholder governance.

A commitment to “better documentation in the future” is not sufficient.

5. Africa cannot be the sandbox for experimental governance models.

A governance structure that would never be contemplated for RIPE or ARIN should not be entertained simply because it emerges from an African political consortium.

Consistency across regions is essential.

The legitimacy of the RIR system depends on it.

The current ambiguity, whether inadvertent or deliberate, risks creating a two-tiered model of global governance, where African Internet institutions become testbeds for political experimentation under the guise of development.

This is unacceptable.

6. ICANN must make three clarifications if it wishes to restore trust.

(1) Publish the MoU limitations and meetings minutes and Project Agreement with Smart Africa.

Without transparency, there can be no legitimacy.

(2) State clearly whether CAIGA is compatible with ICP-2 as currently written.

The global community deserves an explicit answer, not a hedge.

(3) Commit that ICANN will not support, fund, or participate in any initiative that proposes RIR governance structures without prior bottom-up community consultation.

This is the minimum standard for maintaining trust in the global RIR system.

Concluding without Conclusion

ICANN’s role in the Smart Africa Blueprint is not simply a procedural misunderstanding. It exposes structural weaknesses in ICANN’s boundary maintenance, transparency, and accountability. These are not African issues; they are systemic governance issues, and the community deserves forthright answers.

I encourage ICANN to confront these concerns directly and restore the clarity and predictability upon which the legitimacy of the RIR system depends.

Sincerely,

Amin Dayekh