On Sun, 4 Jul 2021 at 08:11, Daniel Karrenberg <dfk@ripe.net> wrote:
The RIPE NCC is a pretty bottom-up de-facto monopoly. Its mission creep is steered by RIPE. In fact this very working group is the major venue for steering the mission creep. Anyone can participate here and we will never know they are a dog.
My intention was not to sneer, I just wanted to point it out to elaborate why RIPE is better equipped to operate its own compute and why that may not translate to generic cases. While in relative to product procured it is a significant cost, in absolute terms to the bottom line it is quite an immaterial cost. It would be very work intensive to try to change this, with no personal benefit whatsoever, and significant personal cost. There are strong status quo biases at play, where people justify what we have is right because it is what we have, which would support equally well any type of alternative RIR setup we could imagine. If we could shop around for our resources from any RIR or if number management and extra curriculum would be separated, I'm sure we can all agree that the wide market would pay the least it can to receive the number service sufficient to its goals and that true costs of number management are significant lower that RIR costs. This is not RIPE specific by any means. -- ++ytti