Summary

The address block was registered in July 1996, when its netname still reads the story plainly: DE-EDEKA-19960717. Three decades later, the public record around it describes an organisation holding resources without operating the network that uses them — and operating a network whose registration layer has stopped recording anything.

The two tiers

Start with the tier BTW has followed for months. The directory entity DFINFRA corresponds to a RIPE role object, DA9499-RIPE, created on 10 June 2021 at the address New-York-Ring 6, 22297 Hamburg, maintained under EDDI-MNT, and listed as both administrative and technical contact of AS210860 [https://ip.cc/topic/asn/AS210860/]. The autonomous system itself carries the as-name edeka_digital, the organisation ORG-EDG14-RIPE, status ASSIGNED, created on 24 August 2021 and last modified on 27 October 2021 [https://ip.cc/topic/asn/AS210860/], [https://robtex.com/en/as-numbers/AS210860]. Its declared import and export clauses name AS9211 and AS13237 [https://robtex.com/en/as-numbers/AS210860]. Nothing in that object has changed in nearly five years.

The routing tier tells a different story about the same resources. AS210860 has not appeared in the global routing table since 26 March 2026. Hurricane Electric's toolkit records zero currently announced prefixes, a single historical prefix (193.21.248.0/21, credited to EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH) and a single observed peer, AS9211 [https://bgp.he.net/AS210860]. CIDR Report classifies the ASN as NOT Announced and not a visible transit AS [https://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS210860&view=2.0]. IPinfo marks it Inactive with zero IPv4 addresses and zero prefixes [https://ipinfo.io/AS210860]. Three independent observers agree on the verdict: this network is dark.

But the address space underneath has not gone dark. RIPEstat's prefix page for 193.20.0.0/15 shows the block registered with netname DE-EDEKA-19960717, country DE, org ORG-EDG14-RIPE, status ALLOCATED PA, source RIPE — and originated as an exact match by AS197909, with an IRR route object of the same origin and RPKI resource metadata referencing EDEKA-RS / EDEKA Rechenzentrum Sued Betriebs GmbH [https://stat.ripe.net/resource/193.20.0.0/15]. The legacy /15 is live. It is simply not being announced by the autonomous system the frozen registry layer is wired to.

What the split proves — and what it cannot

Read together, the two tiers prove something precise: within one corporate group, recorded holdership and operational routing have decoupled. The organisation object ORG-EDG14-RIPE holds the resources; the DFINFRA role object remains their contact surface; AS210860 — the ASN created in 2021 to carry the edeka_digital identity — announces nothing. The actual origination of the legacy block sits with AS197909, a network whose registry identity points to a different EDEKA operating company.

This decoupling is not, by itself, a contradiction. Registration and routing measure different things. A registry entry proves a holder and a contact; a routing table proves an announcer at a moment in time. Neither proves operational control, commercial relationships or who made the decision to move origination from one ASN to another. The 1996 block being originated by AS197909 could reflect a lease, an intra-group mandate, a simple route-object convention or an administrative consolidation. The public record retrieved for this article does not say, and this article does not speculate.

What the split does disprove is the tidy narrative that a dormant ASN means dormant address space. Prior coverage — BTW's own included — examined the frozen stack of AS210860 and its objects and asked what would happen to the resources. The answer, observed today, is that the resources are already spoken for by a different tier of the same group. The silence of AS210860 measures the retirement of one ASN, not the abandonment of one address block.

The evidence chain, with its limits disclosed

The strongest evidence here is routing observation. Three independent observers [https://bgp.he.net/AS210860], [https://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS210860&view=2.0], [https://ipinfo.io/AS210860] converge on AS210860's dormancy with dates and counts rather than adjectives, and RIPEstat's prefix page gives the live origination of the /15 with an exact-match announcement [https://stat.ripe.net/resource/193.20.0.0/15].

Registry evidence is weaker by construction. The authoritative RIPE Database web UI lookup for AS210860 again returned only an application shell with no readable object values this run [https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/lookup?key=AS210860&type=aut-num] — a failure that recurs across this month's investigations — so every registry value cited here comes from named third-party mirrors at dated snapshots [https://ip.cc/topic/asn/AS210860/], [https://robtex.com/en/as-numbers/AS210860]. Those mirrors also diverge on ORG-EDG14-RIPE itself: older renderings show EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH with a last-modified date of 27 October 2021, while newer renderings show EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH with a 13 May 2026 modification date [https://dcxv.com/ipv4/net/193.20.0.0/15], [https://ipinfo.io/AS210860]. This article reports that divergence as divergence; it cannot adjudicate which rendering reflects a registry event and which reflects snapshot freshness.

Third-party reproduction of RIPEstat adds a further unresolved contradiction: mirrors describe RIPEstat as rendering AS210860's RIR status as RESERVED with no holder, while WHOIS mirrors show ASSIGNED with an EDEKA organisation attached. RIPEstat's own AS page was not directly retrieved this run, so that contradiction is disclosed as a secondhand characterisation rather than verified at origin [https://stat.ripe.net/AS210860].

The transfer market offers exactly one dated signal, and it fails scrutiny on its own terms. A DCXV record dated 23 December 2025 describes a RIPE-to-RIPE "merger or acquisition" movement from EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH to EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH, nominally tagged to 193.20.0.0/15 — while internally describing the movement as a single /24 of roughly 256 addresses and labelling the destination company as Austrian [https://dcxv.com/ipv4/transfer/694b3b9e0f62eb0d918212e0]. A separate DCXV page renders the current owner of the /15 as EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH (DE) [https://dcxv.com/ipv4/net/193.20.0.0/15], consistent in direction with the transfer record but not corroborating its details. The record is quoted here as an internally inconsistent third-party claim, not resolved in either direction.

One negative finding closes the perimeter: AS210972 — mentioned in earlier external speculation around these entities — is TIDEO-AS, registered to the Danish company Tideo ApS under ORG-TA1587-RIPE, with no relation to EDEKA, ORG-EDG14-RIPE or AS210860 [https://bgp.tools/as/210972]. Comparisons to it are excluded.

For corporate context only: the Bundeskartellamt cleared EDEKA's indirect acquisition of a dairy company on 24 February 2025 and treats the EDEKA group as a single economic entity headquartered in Hamburg [https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2025/02_24_2025_Edeka.html]. That release is unrelated to internet number resources and supports no claim about network decisions; it merely confirms the group-level framing under which these Hamburg-registered resources sit.

What would change the picture

The falsifying observations are concrete. If AS210860 re-announces any prefix, the two-tier split dissolves and the network has returned. If an authoritative RIPE Database read ever confirms a dated 2026 holdership change on ORG-EDG14-RIPE or an edit to the aut-num, the registry layer has moved too. Any RIPE transfer-statistics entry or PeeringDB edit would constitute an observable disposition. As of this run, none of these has occurred [https://bgp.he.net/AS210860], [https://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS210860&view=2.0], [https://ipinfo.io/AS210860], [https://ip.cc/topic/asn/AS210860/], [https://robtex.com/en/as-numbers/AS210860] — and BTW's own prior disposition analysis, which first documented this stability, remains the anchor for what has and has not changed [https://btw.media/en/governance/rir-watchdog/ripe-ncc/story/dfinfra-as210860-resource-disposition].