Summary

  • RIPE NCC's approved 2026 activity plan shows a €1,800 annual LIR service fee with €246 assigned to “The Registry” in its explanatory per-fee chart. The approved 2027 charging scheme sets the fee at €1,894, but the draft 2027 activity plan assigns €242 of it to the Registry. The fee rises €94 while that slice falls €4.
  • The draft's organization-wide operating budget rises €3.050 million, from €41.125 million to €44.175 million. Technology adds €1.790 million and depreciation €1.245 million; the Registry adds €15,000. Those three changes exactly account for the increase.

RIPE NCC has given its members a wonderfully blunt budget diagram. Pay €94 more for an LIR account next year, and the part labelled “The Registry” gets €4 less of the illustrated fee. No sleight of hand is needed to find the story. The association printed the two numbers itself. The question is what a mandatory common charge is buying when its named address-book function occupies a smaller part of the bill.

Start with the approved 2026 Activity Plan and Budget. Its “Where Your 1,800 Service Fee Goes” chart allocates €246 to the Registry, €560 to Information Services, €428 to External Engagement and Community, €525 to Organisational Sustainability, €16 to bad debts, €24 to depreciation and €1 to surplus. The parts add to €1,800. That chart is RIPE NCC's explanation of a standard fee, not a ring-fenced invoice for any individual account. It gives members a choice of questions sharper than “did the fee rise?”

The 2027 Charging Scheme has already fixed the annual contribution at €1,894 per LIR account, up €94 or 5.22%. The draft 2027 Activity Plan and Budget then shows where that fee goes in its own chart: Registry €242, Technology €626, External Engagement and Community €420, Organisational Sustainability €513, bad debts €16 and depreciation €77. These add to €1,894. Technology is the draft's new category name where the bridge maps the previous Information Services budget. The labels changed; the comparison is supplied by RIPE NCC's own bridging table.

Do the fee arithmetic without rhetoric. From the 2026 chart to the 2027 draft, Technology gains €66 per account and depreciation €53. The Registry loses €4, External Engagement €8, Organisational Sustainability €12, while the 2026 €1 surplus disappears and bad debts stay at €16. 66 + 53 - 4 - 8 - 12 - 1 = 94. The Registry share falls from 13.67% of the illustrated €1,800 to 12.78% of €1,894. A larger payment therefore buys a smaller proportional Registry slice and four fewer Registry euros in the association's own presentation.

The organization-wide table tells the same story with a different denominator. Budgeted operating costs rise from €41.125 million in 2026 to €44.175 million in the 2027 draft, an increase of €3.050 million. Technology goes from €12.800 million to €14.590 million, a rise of €1.790 million. Depreciation rises from €540,000 to €1.785 million, adding €1.245 million. The Registry goes from €5.665 million to €5.680 million, adding €15,000. Add those three changes and the whole €3.050 million increase is accounted for. External Engagement and Community remains €9.800 million, Organisational Sustainability €11.945 million and bad debts €375,000.

That bridge is more revealing than a quarrel over one meeting or one salary. The Registry's total operating budget is nearly flat while its share of total operating costs falls from 13.78% to 12.86%. The pressure sits in technology and the accounting cost of assets. RIPE NCC's draft publication notice says it plans a technical-infrastructure renewal, with separate capital expenditure of €10.48 million in 2027 against €930,000 in 2026. Those capital figures are a different table from the operating-cost bridge. Both show where management is putting weight.

Members can favour more resilient technology and still ask why it sits inside a flat LIR fee model. The per-fee chart is a statement of institutional priorities: the common price includes registry work, systems, community activity, organizational overhead and asset depreciation. Its draft 2027 split makes the price of the address-book function unusually visible precisely because that slice shrinks. A service line can be useful without every LIR agreeing that it belongs in the same compulsory bundle at the same price.

RIPE NCC says the Board will consider feedback and approve a final 2027 activity plan in December. That final document will settle the planned allocation. Until then, the approved fee and the draft budget stand on different procedural footing. The clean question for the Board is already on the page: if the member pays €94 more while the Registry slice loses €4, what exact part of the common bill has members authorised the association to expand?

RIPE NCC originals