The fundamental underlying issue is probably RIPE's cost structure. Its 2025 spending was 52% more than ARIN. There is less budget transparency than ARIN in terms of senior management compensation and former RIPE employees have told me that staff is receiving a premium to the market. There are a lot more RIPE member complaints than ARIN member complaints.

RIPE has 202 employees versus 106 for ARIN. ARIN's operating expenses were $31.5 million for 2025. But RIPE's was 40 million Euros or using purchasing price parity $48 million.

So there is prima facie evidence of costs being too high.

Now, maybe if an apples-to-apples comparison were done, RIPE would come out smelling like roses, but it would be interesting to compare ARIN's pricing with RIPE's pricing.

If you work with or for RIPE or have personal relationships with RIPE employees, please don't reply to my comments because your comments are tainted by self-interest. You should know better.

Regards,

Roderick.

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 5:59 PM Alarig Le Lay via ripe-list <ripe-list@ripe.net> wrote:

On Mon 09 Mar 2026 20:04:16 GMT, info@rudaki-ix.net wrote:
> Especially when there is war in the country, and paying 1000 euros for
> PI IPv4 and IPv6 IXP assignments is a knife in the back.

Even outside of war time, it’s still a stab in the back. I’m running
four small IXPs in France (to try to avoid having everything going back
and forth to Paris), with a budget of 0 €.
Asking for some LIRs to sponsor the objects as they aren’t that
expensive is something possible; with fees to 1000 € per year, it will
very probably mean closing all those IXPs. Even if some 100G ports
connected to major operators are in production.

--
Alarig
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