Sophia Bekele

The Messi of gTLDs: How ZACR, the AUC-Aligned Registry, Became the Protected Beneficiary of a Rigged System

The Messi of gTLDs: The .Africa Applicant That Never Had to Play by the Same Rules

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, ICANN and Governance /

Published First on Linkedin Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  ICANN in the Public Square Again | Part II   Gianni Infantino is in trouble. After his failed plan to commercialise the World Cup, UEFA and several major European federations withdrew their support. He is now counting on the Confederation of African Football’s 54-member bloc to […]

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Polictical Interference, ICANN GAC, Kenya

Kenya Lost .africa. Here Is the Story The Citizen Kenya Left Out

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, Economic Policy, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  Kenya already had a chance at an African domain. It did not end well. The Citizen Kenya recently ran a piece encouraging ICANN’s 2026 gTLD round as an opportunity for Kenya to run custom web domains and strengthen its digital identity. Someone brought it

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Infographic showing the precedent chain from DotConnectAfrica Trust v. ICANN IRP Final Declaration, Paragraph 74 (2015) to Amazon EU v. ICANN IRP Final Declaration, Paragraph 88 (2017), with the caption: One ruling. Cited. Applied. Endures."

Whose Precedent Gets Remembered? Selective Amplification Has Its Own Amnesia

AI, AI Governance, Digital Sovereignty, ICANN and Governance /

Published Exclusively for CircleID.  Part of the ICANN & Governance Series  Whose Precedent Gets Remembered in the Multistakeholder model I read Amin Dayekh’s piece on the Constituent Community Doctrine a few weeks ago and recognized every mechanism he described and found it real. I left a comment laying out what happened with .africa. He responded saying he is already

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Sophia Bekele AEGIS Architecture RSAC 2026 AI Governance

RSAC 2026 Just Handed Sovereign AI Architecture: Its Biggest Proof Point

AI, Cyber Security, Digital Sovereignty, Ethical Technocrat /

March 28, 2026The article is part of the AI, Cybersecurity, and Risk series → The conference declared AI governance is the unsolved crisis of our time. I was at RSA Conference this week in San Francisco. Hundreds of vendors. Thousands of security professionals.Billions of dollars of product on the expo floor. And the loudest signal

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