Dear Clément, The point about voting rights is valid. However, this is something that potentially affects all membership organisations without multiple account structures, and indeed there is nothing to prevent people from doing it now. It was a concern when additional LIRs were previously restricted, but in reality we have no evidence that people did this in significant numbers. The cost and overhead involved in setting up a significant number of new legal entities to affect voting outcomes is not something we now see as likely given the costs involved, and avoiding this issue with a multiple LIR construction does not seem like the right approach. Your suggestion about allowing a single member to pay to be added to the IPv4 Waiting List is indeed something that we have considered. We believe this, and the current waiting list policy in itself, is something that should be discussed by the community so that we would know our operations are in line with the community’s intentions regarding the allocation of resources (on the waiting list). We plan to bring this up with the community during our update at the Address Policy Working Group session at RIPE 93. Thanks for your contributions, Gabor RIPE NCC Chief Registry Officer On Sat, 3 Oct 2026 at 10:25, Clement Cavadore <ccavadore@vedege.net> wrote:
Hello Gabor,
Thank you for pointing this out. There is no good solution for now, as if NCC does not allow any additionnal LIR per member, then, there will be additionnal members (with voting rights) using different legal entities (but same shareholders), as stated in the ripe labs article. Isn't it more risky, as those "additionnal members" get voting rights?
Maybe we should introduce something like the ability to get inserted in the waiting list as an existing LIR, for a fixed amount (which would be, let's say, something like (signup fee + 4 years of membership), which would roughly be what an additionnal LIR with /24 would cost to an existing structure), and explain where does that fee comes from ?
That would cover: ~2 years of waiting + 2 years of allocation before being transferable, and avoid having to create an additionnal LIR, and later, handle a transfer of resource. This is not either a perfect solution, but that would still allow new LIR to come and get inserted in the waiting list with their new membership, and allow existing one willing to "bet on the future" to have a solution out of the transfer/broker market.
Kind regards,
Clément Cavadore
On Fri, 2026-10-02 at 14:10 +0200, Gabor de Wit wrote:
Dear Clément,
The issue is not so much with the cost of adding or maintaining individual LIR accounts. My colleague Marco recently published a RIPE Labs article that dives into this in more detail. In that article, he explains that “Most RIPE NCC systems were originally designed around the assumption that a registry account represents one member organisation. Allowing several registry accounts for the same member introduces complexity at almost every layer of the organisation.” There are costs to the organisation (and membership) to this complexity.
Marco provides a comprehensive list of the areas in which we experience this. Please see his article at:
https://labs.ripe.net/author/marco_schmidt/multiple-lir-accounts-looking-bac...
Kind regards,
Gabor de Wit RIPE NCC Chief Registry Officer
On Wed, 30 Sept 2026 at 14:14, Clement Cavadore via members-discuss <members-discuss@ripe.net> wrote:
Hello,
I hardly understand where is the overhead for NCC for those 2% of members: If they already know the organisation with their first membership, why should it be such an overhead to add another one with the same administrative informations? Please, explain !
Kind regards,