Summary

  • RIPE NCC's 22 October report records five members and 23 End Users newly frozen under EU sanctions applicable to its services; four more members were put on hold.
  • The large End User cluster entered the change table on 8 September. A registry freeze stops new-resource and transfer requests while existing registrations remain in place.

A registry can stop handing out keys without switching off the lights. That is the practical shape of the latest RIPE NCC sanctions transparency report, published on 22 October. Its change table lists five members and 23 End Users newly frozen since the previous quarter. Twenty-two of those End User rows carry 8 September; one is dated 3 September. Four members were separately marked “on hold” in August. This was a concentrated administrative event, with a different kind of resource holder occupying most of the new frozen rows.

RIPE NCC describes the frozen cases as entities subject to EU sanctions applicable to its services. It freezes the registration of their resources in the RIPE Database. That closes the gate for further allocations and transfers. Existing registrations stay recorded, and the registry does not terminate a member's Standard Service Agreement simply because of that status. The report gives resource counts and the holder's country of legal registration. It does not name the holders, so its rows cannot be turned into a roster of networks.

The End User detail matters. One 8 September row holds 1,024 IPv4 addresses and one ASN; several rows list zero IPv4 addresses but one ASN. Address totals therefore miss some of the administrative reach. An ASN can be the whole resource represented by a row. Conversely, adding the row counts is no measure of disconnected traffic: the governing act is a registry restriction on transactions, with the existing resource record still there.

“On hold” has its own route into the same locked desk. RIPE NCC uses it when a member or End User has not cooperated with checks or cannot produce documents that conclude the investigation. The four August member entries are on that track; the five member and 23 End User freezes are the confirmed-applicable-sanctions track. One on-hold member also holds resources as an End User, a reason to count roles and records carefully rather than treating every label as a separate company.

The previous quarterly report ended its status series on 2 July with 25 confirmed applicable cases and 16 on hold. The new series shows 53 and 20 on 1 October. Those figures describe administrative case status, not a new law or an Internet outage. The sharp change is visible in the named categories of the change table: End Users now dominate the quarter's newly frozen records.