Hello Jeroen, Thanks for your suggestions,
On 17 Nov 2025, at 14:47, Jeroen Massar via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
On 17 Nov 2025, at 13:48, Marco Schmidt <mschmidt@ripe.net> wrote: [..] On 17/11/2025 12:18, Sasha Romijn wrote:
Hi Marco,
Thanks for working on this proposal.
On 17 Nov 2025, at 12:01, Marco Schmidt <mschmidt@ripe.net> wrote:
Introduce a new reg-nr: attribute for RIPE NCC co-maintained organisation objects, containing verified company registration numbers issued by national authorities. Will this have some kind of scope to a country/registry? If I see a number, how do I know where to look it up? It might even be ambiguous without scope, as the same number might be used in different company registries. I don't know if all countries have a single registry. For countries with multiple regional company registries, such as Germany or the USA, we would specify which registry contains the legal entity’s record. For countries with a single national registry, the existing attribute with country code of legal registration together with the new company registration number attribute should be sufficient to identify the resource holder.
This sounds like a good thing to have.
Can we get that in WHOIS and then also have that as a dump for easy ingestion?
We plan to include the reg-nr: attribute in the daily Whois dump and split files.
An example WHOIS entry on how this could look like could be a good example.
I think having both the URL of the company register (so that one does not have to figure out what it is), be that a link to a contact address that one has to call to get details, or that has a public lookup interface can help a lot. Eg Switzerland has https://zefix.admin.ch <https://zefix.admin.ch/> enter the name and one can see what is behind the company and if that looks like something that is legal or barely legal.
We plan to include a URL to the company register on the database web query page, where possible (based on the number format and the legal country: attribute value). However I'd prefer not to encode the number as a URL in the reg-nr: attribute itself. Making a link for interactive users to click is convenient but makes it harder for client programs to parse (there's no standard URL format for registration numbers that I'm aware of). Also we may not be able to identify a URL for all types of registration numbers (it depends on the registry). And if a URL ever changes, it's easier to update the web application than re-synchronise all affected registration numbers to the RIPE database.
At least, it will solve the big problem of companies claiming to have a POBox in one country and then having their "company" registered in the fun countries that do not seem to have any legal process or escalation paths whatsoever. Unfortunately there are many of those.
Correct, in addition to the legal country attribute, the aim is to make it easier to identify the resource holder.
One additional thing would be as it is not GPDR sensitive, that this information is also exposed in a DB dump, so that one can easily take such a dump, and mark prefixes as 'fun traffic'. This will help with scoring in various locations to what extent traffic might actually just be anonymous / disrespecting of the law or not. And yes, it sucks then for entities that are actually located in those countries, they are trying to get by and sucked into that too :(...
If I understand correctly, this is already possible using the country: attribute which identifies the legal address of the resource holder organisation. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC