On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 11:56:28AM +0100, Nigel Titley wrote:

ACTION REQUIRED: The Board asks the membership to provide their opinion on and discuss the following points:

1. Is the activity of members opening additional LIR accounts a problem that must be prevented?

Possibly, although it looks like not on a massive scale. Rather it looks like there are a small number of obvious abusers.

2. If this activity is a problem that must be prevented, what action should the RIPE NCC take to attempt its prevention?

I'm not in favour of blanket-banning additional LIRs. This would be regulating deeply into how members structure their business. I can think of a few legitimate reasons to have multiple LIR accounts - for instance if you're preparing a BU for spinning off, it may be convenient to create a second LIR and transfer the resources it needs to that. Of course this can also be done by creating a second legal entity and that is my second point: Such a ban would not be terribly efficient. Creating another legal entity or two is not very hard and, compared to the NCC membership cost, it's not very expensive either (depends on the jurisdiction, of course, it's easier in some than in others). If one intended to abuse this system, one could use straw men too, this is nothing new. A possible compromise solution could be to limit the additional accounts a member can open (to like 2 or 3) to catch legitimate use cases. rgds, Sascha Luck