Summary

  • RIPE NCC's Board has temporarily stopped members acquiring additional LIR accounts, including requests already in progress. Existing extra accounts remain in place.
  • At the October General Meeting, Hans Petter Holen reported 100 survey responses: 51 used extra accounts to separate business units, 28 cited internal access rights for services such as RPKI and transfers, and 41 already planned to merge accounts. Those answers are not a count of all affected members.

The side door is locked, but RIPE NCC has not yet rebuilt the room behind it. Its Board's September restriction stops members adding another Local Internet Registry account. It does not close the accounts they already have. At the October General Meeting, chief executive Hans Petter Holen put a more revealing number on the table than the familiar 708 extra accounts: 28.

That is how many of the first 100 survey respondents cited internal access rights as a reason to keep separate accounts for work such as RPKI and resource transfers. Fifty-one cited separate business units or departments. Forty-one said they already planned to merge accounts. These are overlapping survey answers, not a neat partition of 100, and no one has shown that the respondents represent all 410 members with extra accounts.

RIPE's own access guide already gives LIR users regular, billing and administrator roles, and includes RPKI and transfer functions. The complaint is therefore more precise than “there are no permissions.” Holen said better access control could let a member administer its address space and membership in one place instead of scattering work across accounts. The survey does not specify which rights each of those 28 respondents could not separate under the current setup.

There are two decisions here. Whether one member may obtain more than one IPv4 waiting-list allocation belongs to address policy. Whether a member can assign the right person the right RPKI or transfer authority belongs to RIPE's operating system. A policy debate cannot design that screen. A portal update cannot settle who gets another /24.

The Board has stopped the account workaround before finishing either answer. Holen said RIPE would examine functions that remove reasons for multiple accounts. A published rights design and a count of accounts actually consolidated would show whether the new door works. Until then, the freeze is a stop sign; the survey is the map of the traffic behind it.

Official originals: RIPE NCC October General Meeting transcript; RIPE NCC Chief Registry Officer on the restriction; RIPE NCC Access roles and services.