9 ms·

RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war

212 points by iam-TJ 4y ago

prvit 4y ago
It is pretty surprising that RIPEs solution to sanctions is to just offer their services for free to those who can’t pay due to sanctions.
- mtmail 4y ago
  The United Nations also allows 2 years non-payment before a member looses voting rights, currently 4 countries https://www.un.org/en/ga/about/art19.shtml https://www.un.org/en/ga/about/art19.shtml One of the countries, Venezuela, can't pay due to sanctions https://www.france24.com/en/20200622-venezuela-blames-us-sanctions-for-non-payment-of-un-dues https://www.france24.com/en/20200622-venezuela-blames-us-san...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  Many things operate this way - you want to charge people who can pay but offer the service for free to those who actually cannot pay (either because of sanctions or lack of funds, etc). The tricky part is avoiding abuse; but "country claiming it is sanctioned when it is not" is pretty unlikely.
  - anticensor 4y ago
    Why not apply a creditor's default to enforce the debt anyway?
- wmf 4y ago
  Apparently the sanctions also don't requite cutting Internet access to Russia. As long as Russia is still on the Internet we should maintain accurate records. If that means maintaining records for free, so be it. This is akin to the fact that some US states will issue identification to people regardless of their immigration status.
  - prvit 4y ago
    IPv4 space is a super scarce resource, this is IPv4 space held by non-paying RIPE members. Why should it not be distributed among paying members, many of which are desperate for more IPv4? It’s not like it’s impossible for Russian entities to pay either, I regularly receive payments to my European account from Russian companies.
gbil 4y ago
I didn't activelly join the latest RIPE meeting a few days ago, for sure this was not raised in any voting which is a bit strange since the time between the meeting and when this situation started was more than enough for at least a basic voting. But isn't this the same topic as with all other centralized (in a way services), wouldn't the same discussion apply for DNS too ?
- hug 4y ago
  At the risk of sounding flippant, por que no los dos? Any valuable domains are at the same risk, but that's outside of the scope of RIPE or IANA. Fight this. Also fight that.
  - AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
fazfq 4y ago
- computer 4y ago
  There is no such thing as a politically neutral place. Especially not for an organization that has financial ties to many other organizations around the world.
- throw_a_grenade 4y ago
  This is not what the text says at all.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Yes, it's interesting how one finds how to be preoccupied with the plight of the poor Russians in an article literally focused on Ukrainians being forced to do things at gunpoint and how that can be blocked.
    - fazfq 4y ago
      Sorry, next time I will ask you what part of the article I should comment on before I post.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        You're free to comment on whatever you want, same as we're free to comment on whatever you chose.
throw_a_grenade 4y ago
Is there a linkable example of how such forced transfer looks like?
egorfine 4y ago
> The adoption of a new policy would take at least months Of course. One must form a committee to thoroughly research the matter and collect feedback from all involved parties. /s
iam-TJ 4y ago
There are many discussion threads at the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) Services Working Group (ncc-services-wg) mailing list with a lot of direct and ancillary information [0]. There is also a detailed factual exposition of the technical changes forced by Russia since 2014 in Crimea and later Kherson "Rerouting of Kherson follows familiar gameplan" [1]. In [3] below Viktoriia Opanasiuk writes: "responding on «As this only affects LIRs, I doubt there will be significant participation by non-LIRs» I must say that it affects all internet service providers that use IP resources. In Ukraine there are more than 5 000 registered ISPs, but not all of them are LIRs. The situation that we have now is that when russian troops withdraw from our territory, they dismantle and take with them not only washing machines, but also telecom equipment, TV- and radio-transmitters, leaving people who live there without any information channels and means of communication. We have to re-build telecom and internet infrastructure, and yes, we could bring new equipment there, but if the IP addresses of local Internet Providers will be transferred to other parties, we will not be able to restore even our critical infrastructure there, and there is no place to get new IPv4 addresses. Therefore any solutions that involve allowing transfers now and somehow reverting them later are not solving this immediate problem that we have." The threads with most focus seem to be: "Protecting Resource Holders in Distressed Areas" [2] "IP adress transferring in Ukraine" [3] "UA IP transfer" [4] "UA IP transfers situation" [5] [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/thread.html#3577 https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [1] https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-familiar-gameplan/ https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-fam... [1] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003550.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [2] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003581.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [3] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003588.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [4] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003612.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...
- iam-TJ 4y ago
  In the interest of balance this ncc-services-wg message by Max Tulyev appears to provide some background and seems to imply a possible power-play by Ukraine parliament/government people and for which no evidence of actual 'rogue' transfers are provided [0]. Although as people may have guns at their heads it would be difficult to know if a block transfer were under duress or not. It would seem possible to analyse transfers since 2014 affecting Crimea and the Donbas regions, and transfers since February 2022 affecting occupied territory. [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003612.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...
thriftwy 4y ago
Suppose you are a small Ukrainian ISP working in Berdyansk or Melitopol. In 2022 you essentially become an ISP working on Russian-held territory. Does RIPE want to just confiscate your address pool and redistribute it back in Ukraine in some form, leaving you without address space? How does that help the people living on that territory?
- wazoox 4y ago
  People in these territories face a life of pain any way you look at it, frankly. IP addresses are probably pretty low among their current concerns... They're currently living in a war-torn country under Putin's iron fist. If at some point the Ukrainian army reconquer these areas, there will probably be a witch hunt if not plain ethnic cleansing. If they stay Russian, they'll live forever under the power of Putin's militias and oligarchy. Unfortunately I see no possible positive outcome for them. That's horrifying.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  It may not directly help that ISP, but increasing numbers of the people living in that territory will be Russian invaders, as the Ukrainians living there are murdered or deported. And helping the invaders is problematic. It may indirectly help that ISP or other ISPs in the future if the world makes a general policy of not supporting looting of IP addresses or anything else. If profits from looting are reduced, it may make invasions less likely, as both the rank & file and the leaders/oligarchs have less to gain. And people working at ISPs would generally benefit from their country not being invaded.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  The IP addresses are assigned to organizations (ISPs), not countries, so if you are the same ISP, it does not really matter which country held the territory. The article is more about risk of ukrainian ISPs on occupied territories being forced 'at gunpoint' to transfer their IP addresses to russian ISPs.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There are millions of questions like this - and at some point the small Ukrainian ISP is de facto a small Russian ISP. Often the best thing to do in (reality, practicality) is let things continue as they were, even if technically you could cut them off entirely "as punishment to the Russians" - because it wouldn't actually punish any Russians whatsoever, but would hurt the people on the ground.
pjc50 4y ago
Starting to wonder how much the global takeoff of the Internet and specifically the WWW was due to the "end of history" period from 1989-2001, when there wasn't significant conflict between major powers. I suspect the spillover from this will be increasing Balkanisation of the Internet simply in order to limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  > limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield. This was already done years ago by concentrating "the internet" and limiting it to a few companies with ban-hammers ready. What once used to be many many different personal webpages, blogs, forums, chat sites (and protocols), is now basically limited to facebook (facebook, whatsapp, instagram), twitter and google (plus some outliers, such as telegram). Even with the mainstream news services, a huge percentage of people read that (MSM) news on sites like facebook and twitter (or atleast get linked from there). Other countries have their own bundles of services (wechat in china, yandex+vk in russia, etc.) So basically from a million different sources, pages, social groups, we've gone down to single digits per language group... and all of them can be monitored and censored by a few individuals with few agendas.
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    This feels more like a thing that "just happened" rather than something that was intentionally done. Blogs and such are still there, they just take an much work as they always have. And the centralized sites don't require nearly as much intentionality.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      > rather than something that was intentionally done Normal users cannot even put a link into an instagram post (pointing to whatever external site).... it seems pretty intentional to me (to keep you on their platform)
      - 4y ago
afhammad 4y ago
What are some non-obvious or second order effects of this?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
t-3 4y ago
These problems could be easily solved by moving to IPv6, but that doesn't leave any room for rent-seeking, so people would rather complain about nonsense like stealing IP addresses.
- humble_dude_1 4y ago
  "There is no downside to IPv6, besides inertia."
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    I thought IPv4 is used in order to not rebuild infrastructure from scratch.
    - rascul 4y ago
      Does infrastructure need to be rebuilt from scratch for ipv6?
      - t-3 4y ago
        No, that's the whole point of having a layered network stack.
      - wmf 4y ago
        Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus need to be replaced.
        nobody9999 4y ago
        >Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus need to be replaced. A fair point. Many older (and possibly some current) consumer routers don't support IPv6 and would obviously need to be replaced. That said, AFAICT, all the Tier I and Tier II providers and most major ISPs routing infrastructures support IPv6. Depressingly, many of those don't offer IPv6 to their customers. This is anecdata, but my ISP (Spectrum) doesn't offer IPv6 to me (presumably based on my location), but does offer it to other customers. And unless (this is US-centric, I know it's different elsewhere) you have an organization of a certain size[0], and most small businesses and consumers aren't anywhere near big enough, one needs to rely on their ISP for IPv6 allocations/support. I'd add that most modern (last 10-15 years) OS implementations have IPv6 baked in, and most routers have supported dual stack for quite some time, IPv6 should be much more widely deployed in the US. According to Google[1], less than half their users (~41%) access their services via IPv6. That's a significant increase since 2013 or so, but I suspect much of that is because India has ~80% IPv6 utilization. All that said, I hope IPv6 adoption increases across the world in the near to medium term, and more importantly (to me at least) that my ISP starts offering it in my area. [0] https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/#enduser https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/#end... [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...
MichaelZuo 4y ago
It was always a bit confusing how RIPE got around the Crimea switchover in 2014. They must have found a way to reallocate the system over to Russian companies as Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region, but how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep extensive paperwork. I asked about it on SE, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptance-of-communication-with-identifying-characteristics-originating-fr https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptanc..., and there doesn't seem to be a way that this could have been legally accomplished without at the least rescinding recognition of Ukranian sovereignty over Crimea. Which would imply, since all UN countries recognize RIPE NCC as the final and exclusive authority on internet allocation matters in the European region, that the world has stopped recognizing Crimea as Ukrainian, via one degree of separation.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The reality that people don't want to admit in all these things is that the laws, etc, get pushed aside to acknowledge the "reality" in the end - might makes right and possession is 9/10ths of the law always triumphs. And those involved often know not to push things too far when it's "working" - something like "we'll let the Russians route these IPs as long as they don't crow about routing these IPs".
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    This reminds me of the Chinese revolution, where after the Communists took control of everything except Taiwan, many international organizations continued to insist that Taiwan was the actual representative of China, and Taiwan held the Chinese vote at the UN until 1971. So that's about 22 years of pretending. I'm no fan of either communism or the chinese revolution, but I always thought that was ridiculous, that a country so big as China had no UN representation except via Taiwan, and that Taiwan held a permanent member UN security council seat. If, for example, Russia conquers all of Ukraine, then how long will some guy sitting in London keep pretending to be the Government of Ukraine? At some point, all the social media accounts, internet registries, country codes, etc -- they have to be updated to reflect reality.
znpy 4y ago
Possibly unrelated, but: so far russia has invaded the east part of ukraine, with the west part relatively “calm” despite being of course involved in the conflict. I wonder: has no one from the companies on the east side thought of “lending” their address blocks to companies on the west side, momentarily, in hope of ucraine to survive the hostile invasion? A bit like asking companies on the west side to act like trustees, if you will. Just a thought, an honest question.
martinskou 4y ago
All Ripe assigned AS, IP and routing in Russia should be disabled until Russia has removed its forces from Ukraine.

212 points by iam-TJ 4y ago

It is pretty surprising that RIPEs solution to sanctions is to just offer their services for free to those who can’t pay due to sanctions.

mtmail 4y ago
The United Nations also allows 2 years non-payment before a member looses voting rights, currently 4 countries https://www.un.org/en/ga/about/art19.shtml https://www.un.org/en/ga/about/art19.shtml One of the countries, Venezuela, can't pay due to sanctions https://www.france24.com/en/20200622-venezuela-blames-us-sanctions-for-non-payment-of-un-dues https://www.france24.com/en/20200622-venezuela-blames-us-san...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
Many things operate this way - you want to charge people who can pay but offer the service for free to those who actually cannot pay (either because of sanctions or lack of funds, etc). The tricky part is avoiding abuse; but "country claiming it is sanctioned when it is not" is pretty unlikely.
- anticensor 4y ago
  Why not apply a creditor's default to enforce the debt anyway?
wmf 4y ago
Apparently the sanctions also don't requite cutting Internet access to Russia. As long as Russia is still on the Internet we should maintain accurate records. If that means maintaining records for free, so be it. This is akin to the fact that some US states will issue identification to people regardless of their immigration status.
- prvit 4y ago
  IPv4 space is a super scarce resource, this is IPv4 space held by non-paying RIPE members. Why should it not be distributed among paying members, many of which are desperate for more IPv4? It’s not like it’s impossible for Russian entities to pay either, I regularly receive payments to my European account from Russian companies.

gbil 4y ago

I didn't activelly join the latest RIPE meeting a few days ago, for sure this was not raised in any voting which is a bit strange since the time between the meeting and when this situation started was more than enough for at least a basic voting. But isn't this the same topic as with all other centralized (in a way services), wouldn't the same discussion apply for DNS too ?

hug 4y ago
At the risk of sounding flippant, por que no los dos? Any valuable domains are at the same risk, but that's outside of the scope of RIPE or IANA. Fight this. Also fight that.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y ago

fazfq 4y ago

computer 4y ago
There is no such thing as a politically neutral place. Especially not for an organization that has financial ties to many other organizations around the world.
throw_a_grenade 4y ago
This is not what the text says at all.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Yes, it's interesting how one finds how to be preoccupied with the plight of the poor Russians in an article literally focused on Ukrainians being forced to do things at gunpoint and how that can be blocked.
  - fazfq 4y ago
    Sorry, next time I will ask you what part of the article I should comment on before I post.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      You're free to comment on whatever you want, same as we're free to comment on whatever you chose.

throw_a_grenade 4y ago

Is there a linkable example of how such forced transfer looks like?

egorfine 4y ago

> The adoption of a new policy would take at least months Of course. One must form a committee to thoroughly research the matter and collect feedback from all involved parties. /s

iam-TJ 4y ago

There are many discussion threads at the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) Services Working Group (ncc-services-wg) mailing list with a lot of direct and ancillary information [0]. There is also a detailed factual exposition of the technical changes forced by Russia since 2014 in Crimea and later Kherson "Rerouting of Kherson follows familiar gameplan" [1]. In [3] below Viktoriia Opanasiuk writes: "responding on «As this only affects LIRs, I doubt there will be significant participation by non-LIRs» I must say that it affects all internet service providers that use IP resources. In Ukraine there are more than 5 000 registered ISPs, but not all of them are LIRs. The situation that we have now is that when russian troops withdraw from our territory, they dismantle and take with them not only washing machines, but also telecom equipment, TV- and radio-transmitters, leaving people who live there without any information channels and means of communication. We have to re-build telecom and internet infrastructure, and yes, we could bring new equipment there, but if the IP addresses of local Internet Providers will be transferred to other parties, we will not be able to restore even our critical infrastructure there, and there is no place to get new IPv4 addresses. Therefore any solutions that involve allowing transfers now and somehow reverting them later are not solving this immediate problem that we have." The threads with most focus seem to be: "Protecting Resource Holders in Distressed Areas" [2] "IP adress transferring in Ukraine" [3] "UA IP transfer" [4] "UA IP transfers situation" [5] [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/thread.html#3577 https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [1] https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-familiar-gameplan/ https://www.kentik.com/blog/rerouting-of-kherson-follows-fam... [1] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003550.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [2] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003581.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [3] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003588.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022... [4] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003612.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

iam-TJ 4y ago
In the interest of balance this ncc-services-wg message by Max Tulyev appears to provide some background and seems to imply a possible power-play by Ukraine parliament/government people and for which no evidence of actual 'rogue' transfers are provided [0]. Although as people may have guns at their heads it would be difficult to know if a block transfer were under duress or not. It would seem possible to analyse transfers since 2014 affecting Crimea and the Donbas regions, and transfers since February 2022 affecting occupied territory. [0] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022-October/003612.html https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2022...

thriftwy 4y ago

Suppose you are a small Ukrainian ISP working in Berdyansk or Melitopol. In 2022 you essentially become an ISP working on Russian-held territory. Does RIPE want to just confiscate your address pool and redistribute it back in Ukraine in some form, leaving you without address space? How does that help the people living on that territory?

wazoox 4y ago
People in these territories face a life of pain any way you look at it, frankly. IP addresses are probably pretty low among their current concerns... They're currently living in a war-torn country under Putin's iron fist. If at some point the Ukrainian army reconquer these areas, there will probably be a witch hunt if not plain ethnic cleansing. If they stay Russian, they'll live forever under the power of Putin's militias and oligarchy. Unfortunately I see no possible positive outcome for them. That's horrifying.
skyfaller 4y ago
It may not directly help that ISP, but increasing numbers of the people living in that territory will be Russian invaders, as the Ukrainians living there are murdered or deported. And helping the invaders is problematic. It may indirectly help that ISP or other ISPs in the future if the world makes a general policy of not supporting looting of IP addresses or anything else. If profits from looting are reduced, it may make invasions less likely, as both the rank & file and the leaders/oligarchs have less to gain. And people working at ISPs would generally benefit from their country not being invaded.
zajio1am 4y ago
The IP addresses are assigned to organizations (ISPs), not countries, so if you are the same ISP, it does not really matter which country held the territory. The article is more about risk of ukrainian ISPs on occupied territories being forced 'at gunpoint' to transfer their IP addresses to russian ISPs.
bombcar 4y ago
There are millions of questions like this - and at some point the small Ukrainian ISP is de facto a small Russian ISP. Often the best thing to do in (reality, practicality) is let things continue as they were, even if technically you could cut them off entirely "as punishment to the Russians" - because it wouldn't actually punish any Russians whatsoever, but would hurt the people on the ground.

pjc50 4y ago

Starting to wonder how much the global takeoff of the Internet and specifically the WWW was due to the "end of history" period from 1989-2001, when there wasn't significant conflict between major powers. I suspect the spillover from this will be increasing Balkanisation of the Internet simply in order to limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> limit the extent to which it's a cyberwarfare or propaganda battlefield. This was already done years ago by concentrating "the internet" and limiting it to a few companies with ban-hammers ready. What once used to be many many different personal webpages, blogs, forums, chat sites (and protocols), is now basically limited to facebook (facebook, whatsapp, instagram), twitter and google (plus some outliers, such as telegram). Even with the mainstream news services, a huge percentage of people read that (MSM) news on sites like facebook and twitter (or atleast get linked from there). Other countries have their own bundles of services (wechat in china, yandex+vk in russia, etc.) So basically from a million different sources, pages, social groups, we've gone down to single digits per language group... and all of them can be monitored and censored by a few individuals with few agendas.
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  This feels more like a thing that "just happened" rather than something that was intentionally done. Blogs and such are still there, they just take an much work as they always have. And the centralized sites don't require nearly as much intentionality.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    > rather than something that was intentionally done Normal users cannot even put a link into an instagram post (pointing to whatever external site).... it seems pretty intentional to me (to keep you on their platform)
    - 4y ago

afhammad 4y ago

What are some non-obvious or second order effects of this?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

t-3 4y ago

These problems could be easily solved by moving to IPv6, but that doesn't leave any room for rent-seeking, so people would rather complain about nonsense like stealing IP addresses.

humble_dude_1 4y ago
"There is no downside to IPv6, besides inertia."
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  I thought IPv4 is used in order to not rebuild infrastructure from scratch.
  - rascul 4y ago
    Does infrastructure need to be rebuilt from scratch for ipv6?
    - t-3 4y ago
      No, that's the whole point of having a layered network stack.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus need to be replaced.
      - nobody9999 4y ago
        >Not "from scratch" but there are tons of routers that either don't support IPv6 or have broken support and thus need to be replaced. A fair point. Many older (and possibly some current) consumer routers don't support IPv6 and would obviously need to be replaced. That said, AFAICT, all the Tier I and Tier II providers and most major ISPs routing infrastructures support IPv6. Depressingly, many of those don't offer IPv6 to their customers. This is anecdata, but my ISP (Spectrum) doesn't offer IPv6 to me (presumably based on my location), but does offer it to other customers. And unless (this is US-centric, I know it's different elsewhere) you have an organization of a certain size[0], and most small businesses and consumers aren't anywhere near big enough, one needs to rely on their ISP for IPv6 allocations/support. I'd add that most modern (last 10-15 years) OS implementations have IPv6 baked in, and most routers have supported dual stack for quite some time, IPv6 should be much more widely deployed in the US. According to Google[1], less than half their users (~41%) access their services via IPv6. That's a significant increase since 2013 or so, but I suspect much of that is because India has ~80% IPv6 utilization. All that said, I hope IPv6 adoption increases across the world in the near to medium term, and more importantly (to me at least) that my ISP starts offering it in my area. [0] https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/#enduser https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv6/first_request/#end... [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

MichaelZuo 4y ago

It was always a bit confusing how RIPE got around the Crimea switchover in 2014. They must have found a way to reallocate the system over to Russian companies as Ukranian ISPs no longer serve the region, but how they managed to do so without officially acknowledging Russian sovereignty is a mystery. Especially since they keep extensive paperwork. I asked about it on SE, https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptance-of-communication-with-identifying-characteristics-originating-fr https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/64179/does-acceptanc..., and there doesn't seem to be a way that this could have been legally accomplished without at the least rescinding recognition of Ukranian sovereignty over Crimea. Which would imply, since all UN countries recognize RIPE NCC as the final and exclusive authority on internet allocation matters in the European region, that the world has stopped recognizing Crimea as Ukrainian, via one degree of separation.

bombcar 4y ago
The reality that people don't want to admit in all these things is that the laws, etc, get pushed aside to acknowledge the "reality" in the end - might makes right and possession is 9/10ths of the law always triumphs. And those involved often know not to push things too far when it's "working" - something like "we'll let the Russians route these IPs as long as they don't crow about routing these IPs".
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  This reminds me of the Chinese revolution, where after the Communists took control of everything except Taiwan, many international organizations continued to insist that Taiwan was the actual representative of China, and Taiwan held the Chinese vote at the UN until 1971. So that's about 22 years of pretending. I'm no fan of either communism or the chinese revolution, but I always thought that was ridiculous, that a country so big as China had no UN representation except via Taiwan, and that Taiwan held a permanent member UN security council seat. If, for example, Russia conquers all of Ukraine, then how long will some guy sitting in London keep pretending to be the Government of Ukraine? At some point, all the social media accounts, internet registries, country codes, etc -- they have to be updated to reflect reality.

znpy 4y ago

Possibly unrelated, but: so far russia has invaded the east part of ukraine, with the west part relatively “calm” despite being of course involved in the conflict. I wonder: has no one from the companies on the east side thought of “lending” their address blocks to companies on the west side, momentarily, in hope of ucraine to survive the hostile invasion? A bit like asking companies on the west side to act like trustees, if you will. Just a thought, an honest question.

martinskou 4y ago

All Ripe assigned AS, IP and routing in Russia should be disabled until Russia has removed its forces from Ukraine.