"Some dark forces:" Amreesh Phokeer on Internet governance in Africa

Welcome to the Future Web Series. I’m a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. This is a series about where this internet is headed, and what internets might come after this one.

Amreesh Phokeer.

70% of Sub-Saharan Africans lack adequate access to the Internet. I talked to Amreesh Phokeer, an Internet measurement and data expert at the Internet Society. He worked for 10 years at AFRINIC, Africa's regional internet registry, which is headquartered in his home country of Mauritius.

We talked about the Internet in Africa, including:

• How economics, geography, and politics make rolling out the Internet so hard on the continent

• How a lawsuit held up AFRINIC’s operations continent-wide for months

• The future of internet numbering for the “next billion” Internet users

• Much, much more

Links from our conversation:

• ISOC’s Internet resilience measures

• Amreesh’s blog post about resilience measures

• Cloud Innovation is suing AFRINIC for 1.8 billion USD.

• A map of the IPv4 space. (Compare AFRINIC’s space with the U.S. D.o.D’s!)

In case you missed it, the other week, I sat down with Jake Hartnell to talk about DAOs. He works full-time for various DAOs—he has no formal relationship with any traditional corporation. If you couldn’t join us, have a listen to our conversation.

The music in this episode is by Nick Schofield.

Find a transcript of the episode here.