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Gabor de Wit is the Chief Registry Officer at the RIPE NCC. He leads the RIPE NCC’s registry operations, ensuring the accuracy, security and integrity of Internet number resource management across the organisation’s service region. Gabor oversees critical registry processes, including IPv4, IPv6, and ASN allocations, and drives initiatives to continuously improve registry services and automation. He works closely with members, the RIPE community, and global Internet stakeholders to maintain a robust and trusted registry system facilitating a well‑organized, resilient Internet.
• 6 min read
The RIPE NCC Executive Board has decided to temporarily restrict members' ability to acquire additional Local Internet Registry (LIR) accounts. Taking effect on Tuesday, 29 September, the restriction also covers requests already in progress. The decision is a first step towards addressing the admin…
• 10 min read
Becoming a RIPE NCC member is straightforward, but keeping a trusted registry means doing careful checks behind the scenes. This article explains how we verify members at onboarding, monitor changes over time, and follow up on escalations.
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“Gabor, my thinking wasn't to use the cost to discourage, but to use the additional fee to actually pay the cost of maintaining additional accounts. However, you haven't quantified here what that additional cost is, or why it is so disproportionate and onerous. Is the problem simply that additional accounts are being handled as one-offs rather than a core aspect of business? Is this instead a development project an appropriate fee structure could support? Your argument is cost based, but you're not showing the math behind your reasoning.”
Excellent questions indeed. The answer to your initial question is yes: multiple LIR accounts ended up being something that was bolted onto our offering and its fee structure was used to cover the one-off cost and to cover parts of the administration that we have for maintaining the link between the multiple LIR accounts and the member holding them. Throughout our services, the increased complexity of multiple LIR accounts can be felt: from ARCs to transfers, to our monitoring of resource holders in the domain of KYC, overall accuracy and continued due diligence. This brings me to your second point on the development aspect: yes, with unlimited time and money there is always a possibility to fully incorporate any type of offering into our service portfolio (famous last words). Despite not being a commercial organisation, the RIPE NCC should periodically evaluate whether it wants to keep offering certain services versus discontinuing them in favour of bringing efficiencies and using the member fees more effectively. That is for us the main rationale to not start this major project to incorporate a flawed offering, but instead focus on the road ahead. By validating with current members what they truly need, by aligning the member set-up with other RIRs, and by requesting the community to seriously consider a revamp of the IPv4 allocation policy that also affected the original multiple LIR account discussion.
“If cost is the driving factor here, was raising the cost of additional LIR accounts discussed as an approach? This seems like by far the most straightforward approach, but there's no mention of it.”
Thanks for that comment, Marcus. While a higher fee would probably discourage most members from adding LIR accounts, this would not address the technical and administrative overhead caused by having multiple LIR accounts. The underlying complexity would remain as long as the facility exists. Even if only a single member continues to use multiple accounts, or if the option exists, we would still need to maintain the systems and processes to support this setup. Those costs would ultimately be paid by the whole membership rather than being covered by the very small number of members still using the option. Instead, by removing this complexity and simplifying matters for our development teams and administration, it would bring much-needed efficiency gains and cost savings for all.
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