Financial reports are public, and fee structures including salaries and all work areas and work groups are decided and voted on by its members. The highest body of the RIPE non-profit is the general assembly.
I manage two RIPE LIRs, and signup was not more work than joining any other member association. There is an annual invoice, and various payment processor options for that. I wouldn’t want it to be less “bureaucratic“ since I benefit from their processes and transparency. If they didn’t guard it, all of it would be in the hands of a Musk-like soulless broken person hiding behind a tax-evading corporate structure with zero accountability. No thank you.
True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me.
My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do.
Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers.
Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else.
I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number.
I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.
RIPE is not the level to interact with as an end user for IP resources. LIRs act as intermediaries towards such end users. The reason why 255 IPv4 addresses is the smallest chunk you can route these days is a technical one, but apart from that IPv4s are not meant to be moved with end users. This is what DNS is for.
As a hosting or access provider, you are meant to acquire single IP addresses or blocks from LIRs, which in turn assign and route them to a host. It is a federated, layered organizational structure.
I get that you are upset, but I wonder who you are upset at exactly? It is not RIPEs mandate or responsibility to design Internet Protocols. If you want to argue for a better design, you should direct it at the IETF working group based on a study of the current tradeoffs, goals and technical limitations? “I want a different internet!“ Ok sure, go contribute! This openness and collaborative approach is the amazing thing about the Internet. If you have a great idea with technical merit, you will be welcomed with open arms and heard.
Actually, my LIR wants different things than I do, in some cases the opposite. Why replace old hardware or code for IPv6 if we have enough IPv4 to not need to? Why increase adoption of IPv6 if I'm making money renting IPv4 addresses? Why let end-users run websites from their home? Why make it easy for end users to BYOIP or reserve static IPs?
To solve my problems I have to become a LIR because it's the only way to get IP addresses that I get to keep if I switch LIR. Then I can interact with the RIRs and secure addresses in bulk. But I still have no direct relationship with the IANA who I want to influence.
This time, I cannot just become a RIR like I did a LIR because there are only five total in the world. That's a core part of the bullshit - there is no way for the people with influence over the Internet to ever be accountable to me. I can only ask things of people who are incapable of delivering the changes I want. That's why to me, if an RIR is charging me $2k to do something I should be able to do as an end user for free or almost free, I see the RIR as a mere alias of the IANA/IETF.
The other problem is I don't want to be a LIR, and to the extent I act as one, it will be on a small scale. The RIR is accountable to the fulltime, important LIR who don't represent my interests as an end-user.
All I'm left with is trying to walk in the front door and ask a committee of people accountable to the ones profiting off of my problems to do a bunch of work. Great system. All that being said, you're right to suggest giving it a shot.
256, both the zero and all-ones addresses are perfectly usable, and that matters in 2025 IPv4 exhaustion times.
I've been a bit lazy and haven't finished my migration off of google and MS services... I have mixed feelings about my testing of nextcloud and the like. I've got a pretty solid mail solution (mailu) going, but even with that I don't have it on a domain/address I rely on. I'm mostly using a wildcard forward on one of my domains so I can assign a different address to most online and offline accounts as reference.
All three domestic providers do the "we are working in your area" which where it comes to my building "nah" is said and the promises of fast broadband suddenly disappear.
I've been living here 8 years now. Same thing said each year.
It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance.
Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent?
The outcome speaks for itself.
