Summary

  • RIPE Labs announced the RIPE 93 Article Competition results on 22 September: Sebastian Kappes won, and Matthias Wichtlhuber and colleagues received the runner-up prize.
  • The competition rules place the ordinary RIPE Labs publication review before the prize panel. An article enters the public competition list only after it is accepted for publication.
  • Editor Alun Davies reported 11 entries and eight new authors. Those are counts for the competition page, not a total of everyone who submitted work or a measure of the review acceptance rate.
  • The published rules describe the panel’s criteria and a possible close-decision preference, but the announcement does not say that preference affected either result.

The results arrived on 22 September, but the more revealing part of the RIPE 93 competition sits before the award. RIPE Labs’ rules say entrants submit an article through the usual publication process and tick a box to have it considered. The article then receives the normal editorial review. If accepted, it is published on RIPE Labs and added to the competition page. Only then does the prize panel choose the winner and runner-up.

That order matters. “Competition entry” is not the same population as “submission.” The public list contains articles that passed the publication gate; it does not disclose how many pieces were offered to editors, how many were declined or revised, or how long review took. The 11 entries therefore describe the published contest cohort, not an acceptance rate.

In his announcement to the RIPE mailing list, RIPE Labs editor Alun Davies named Sebastian Kappes’s “When Traceroutes Lie: How TTL Jumps Can Give Us a False Impression of the Internet’s Topology” as the winner. The runner-up prize went to Matthias Wichtlhuber and colleagues for “The IRR Landscape: What RPKI Can Replace.” Davies said the competition page contained 11 entries and that eight new authors had contributed. The second figure is the editor’s description; the announcement does not define “new” or identify which authors it covers.

The rules make the pool wider than a short call for fresh submissions. Articles published since the previous competition closed on 3 April 2026 could be entered, and the RIPE 93 competition stayed open until 23:00 Amsterdam time on 2 September. RIPE NCC staff and staff of the other RIRs were ineligible. A panel selects the winner and runner-up, rewarding originality, insight, usefulness and interest to the Internet community.

The rules add a conditional qualification: when a decision is close, preference may be given to first-time RIPE Labs authors and/or people who have not had a chance to engage with the community at a RIPE Meeting. “May” and “in the case of a close decision” are important limits. Neither the results page nor Davies’s message says that the panel invoked this preference, and no score sheet or deliberation is published in the sources reviewed here.

The result is a clear award announcement, not a transparent funnel. Readers can see the articles that reached the competition page and who won; they cannot calculate the proportion of submissions that reached publication or assess how the stated tie-break entered the final comparison. That is not evidence of a flaw in the outcome. It is a boundary on what the public numbers can establish.

Sources: RIPE Labs’ RIPE 93 competition results, editor Alun Davies’s 22 September announcement to the RIPE list, and the competition rules. The two articles named in the results—the winner and runner-up—are linked to identify their titles; their technical arguments are outside this article’s scope.