Annual LIR fees at RIPE are around 2000€, and includes trainings and tickets to meetings. If anything, this serves as a filter for economically unreasonable ventures. Compared to other expenses, even if run purely on volunteer basis (meaning you are donating your time), this seems easily doable.
I've been doing a moderate amount of research on getting an ASN and ipv4/6 blocks so I can BYOIP and host third-party services without being locked into the cloud provider I was using at the time the third-party configured DNS. That has led me down various rabbit holes in which I started learning how the Internet actually works.
IMO the Internet actually sucks ass
Why is there so much bureaucracy and cost involved for someone to own an IP address? I should be able to connect to the network and acquire an IP address as easily as I can buy a merckle-tree-backed pointer to an IPFS image, or vote in a US election. Why do I have to pay hundreds of dollars for Internet Numbers conjured from thin air by a US nonprofit to be resold by a RIR? How fucking moronic is it that IPV4 was created with substantially less capacity than there were humans on Earth, got adopted, wasn't immediately fixed or abandoned once it became obvious that the Internet would be used globally, was irresponsibly allocated, introduced various unofficial but consequential practices (eg NAT), ran out and got expensive, and STILL is widely used alongside ipv6.
What is the point of having a centralized system for governance centered around ICANN/IANA when they are so wildly inefficient and incapable of governing? Fuck 2000€ these are freaking made up numbers that I should be able to buy for pennies with an email address, government ID, and credit card.
Sounds like you might want to dig into what these organizations do for its members besides assignment and management (not sale! you cannot own IP addresses) of shared number resources, to get a better understanding of their membership fees! I am a big fan of RIPE as an organization and appreciate their work (and less so of ARIN but I have little exposure).
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.
> it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of
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.
When I as an end-user am unsatisfied with what I can and cannot do on the Internet, I only have a relationship with my LIR, who has no direct relationship with the central Internet authority for addressing those problems, because they only interact with an RIR. I cannot call my ISP and ask them to put pressure on the entities responsible for accelerating IPv6 adoption.
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.
At least you don't live in australia, where the govt invested in a national broadband network so every aussie could have affordable and fast internet. Guess what we have. A broken cesspool of providers where its going to cost you in excess of $1K p/a to keep a connection to the internet going. Well done straya. Its the same with anything where theres the potential to fleece consumers.
Depending on where you are in the US, it isn't much better. I'm paying $140/month for a 2gb/120mb asymmetric cable connection... I'm paying about that much again for a dedicated server on OVH mostly because they block self-hosting on residential connections, and it costs more than the difference to go to a business connection with a /28 cidr, so I'm renting a server with a better connection instead.
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.
As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism.
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?
I for one love living in a world where ISPs, middlemen, and random internet jackpot winners were able to extract rent through a highly equitable, transparent governance model AND meet yearly at the Hilton.
Just look at the origins of each of these technologies and the times in which they were created and you have all the answers you need. I'm really surprised whenever I read takes like these.
Of course everything is a product of its time, and in 1999 or any other world where the Internet is more of a cool new thing than serious business, it makes sense. But that was 26 years ago.
I am pretty sure the guys charging hundreds of dollars for IP addresses that cost them nothing to produce should be able to set up stripe, an identity verification product, and otherwise automate onboarding. Also, instead of writing giant process documents and slow-walking such wildly difficult problems as "allow domains to end in .cool" through infinitely nested committees they could try wielding their supreme governance over Who Owns Numbers And Names by killing off IPv4.
As long as ICANN/IANA remain in charge of Internet governance and operate with >$100mm budgets [0] "it made sense 25 years ago" is not a valid excuse IMO.
I was going to look up the same... I thought it was a little older than that... it's worth remembering that in 1981 there was no DNS yet, and even for dialup BBSes there were only a handful in the entire country as Hayes modems were new that year. Hell, for years a lot of business email services were dialup, grab packets, send packets and read/reply offline.
This is the same year the IBM PC was first released, and many people felt that would only see fairly limited sales. It wound up selling over 20x projections.
Nobody at the time really thought there would be a need for even more addresses. Not to mention the additional overhead of a wider network on the hardware at the time.
This is a recent 2025 change; we (minimum size ISP) started around 1k, it went to 1.5k in 2023 and 1.8k in 2025.
> and includes trainings and tickets to meetings.
Only one or two (don't remember) tickets are included with the initial becoming a member, none thereafter.
> this seems easily doable.
It's not negligible but not a massive expense either. Even a minimum size ISP is quickly going to be ≥1k€/month on operational expenses. Uplink is the majority for us, location rental & electricity roughly equal at ca. a quarter to third of uplink cost each.
You aren't supposed to be a LIR unless you're serious about reselling RIPE services. You're supposed to get services through some other LIR instead, similar to the relationship between domain registries and registrars. There are many, including several in the hacker community that would be happy to register you for no additional fee beyond the RIPE fee (the 50€/year for registration, not the 2000€/year for being an LIR).
True. The ambitious brains flee europe, the docile remain and love it. That is why the quality of life in europe is steadily going down, and taxes steadily increasing.
In the end, europe will be a historical museum with a tourist economy and nothing else. All industry will have moved to the US and asia.
It's sad, but, it is also a valuable lesson for other regions on how not to destryo themselves!