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Sounds like you might want to dig into what these organizations do for its members besides assignment and management (not sale! you cannot own IP addresses) of

Sounds like you might want to dig into what these organizations do for its members besides assignment and management (not sale! you cannot own IP addresses) of shared number resources, to get a better understanding of their membership fees! I am a big fan of RIPE as an organization and appreciate their work (and less so of ARIN but I have little exposure). Financial reports are public, and fee structures including salaries and all work areas and work groups are decided and voted on by its members. The highest body of the RIPE non-profit is the general assembly. I manage two RIPE LIRs, and signup was not more work than joining any other member association. There is an annual invoice, and various payment processor options for that. I wouldn’t want it to be less “bureaucratic“ since I benefit from their processes and transparency. If they didn’t guard it, all of it would be in the hands of a Musk-like soulless broken person hiding behind a tax-evading corporate structure with zero accountability. No thank you.

johnecheck 1y ago
As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism. It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance. Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent? The outcome speaks for itself.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  I for one love living in a world where ISPs, middlemen, and random internet jackpot winners were able to extract rent through a highly equitable, transparent governance model AND meet yearly at the Hilton.
weitendorf 1y ago
> not sale! you cannot own IP addresses True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me. My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do. Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers. Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else. I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number. I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.
- globalnode 1y ago
  At least you don't live in australia, where the govt invested in a national broadband network so every aussie could have affordable and fast internet. Guess what we have. A broken cesspool of providers where its going to cost you in excess of $1K p/a to keep a connection to the internet going. Well done straya. Its the same with anything where theres the potential to fleece consumers.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Depending on where you are in the US, it isn't much better. I'm paying $140/month for a 2gb/120mb asymmetric cable connection... I'm paying about that much again for a dedicated server on OVH mostly because they block self-hosting on residential connections, and it costs more than the difference to go to a business connection with a /28 cidr, so I'm renting a server with a better connection instead. I've been a bit lazy and haven't finished my migration off of google and MS services... I have mixed feelings about my testing of nextcloud and the like. I've got a pretty solid mail solution (mailu) going, but even with that I don't have it on a domain/address I rely on. I'm mostly using a wildcard forward on one of my domains so I can assign a different address to most online and offline accounts as reference.
    - doublerabbit 1y ago
      $50 a month and still on 2mb ADSL. Living in the centre of the city right next to a hotel that owns an 10Gbit feed. Literally ten steps from my apartment to the cities main telephone line exchange All three domestic providers do the "we are working in your area" which where it comes to my building "nah" is said and the promises of fast broadband suddenly disappear. I've been living here 8 years now. Same thing said each year.
      - tracker1 1y ago
        That sucks... I was stuck in a similar spot for several years at one point. ADSL is definitely on the not fun side of things. Do you know who that hotel's uplink is? You might be able to talk to them about running a direct line, though this will probably cost about $10k or more just to get the line run to your home.

johnecheck 1y ago

As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism. It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance. Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent? The outcome speaks for itself.

weitendorf 1y ago
I for one love living in a world where ISPs, middlemen, and random internet jackpot winners were able to extract rent through a highly equitable, transparent governance model AND meet yearly at the Hilton.

weitendorf 1y ago

> not sale! you cannot own IP addresses True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me. My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do. Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers. Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else. I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number. I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.

globalnode 1y ago
At least you don't live in australia, where the govt invested in a national broadband network so every aussie could have affordable and fast internet. Guess what we have. A broken cesspool of providers where its going to cost you in excess of $1K p/a to keep a connection to the internet going. Well done straya. Its the same with anything where theres the potential to fleece consumers.
- tracker1 1y ago
  Depending on where you are in the US, it isn't much better. I'm paying $140/month for a 2gb/120mb asymmetric cable connection... I'm paying about that much again for a dedicated server on OVH mostly because they block self-hosting on residential connections, and it costs more than the difference to go to a business connection with a /28 cidr, so I'm renting a server with a better connection instead. I've been a bit lazy and haven't finished my migration off of google and MS services... I have mixed feelings about my testing of nextcloud and the like. I've got a pretty solid mail solution (mailu) going, but even with that I don't have it on a domain/address I rely on. I'm mostly using a wildcard forward on one of my domains so I can assign a different address to most online and offline accounts as reference.
  - doublerabbit 1y ago
    $50 a month and still on 2mb ADSL. Living in the centre of the city right next to a hotel that owns an 10Gbit feed. Literally ten steps from my apartment to the cities main telephone line exchange All three domestic providers do the "we are working in your area" which where it comes to my building "nah" is said and the promises of fast broadband suddenly disappear. I've been living here 8 years now. Same thing said each year.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      That sucks... I was stuck in a similar spot for several years at one point. ADSL is definitely on the not fun side of things. Do you know who that hotel's uplink is? You might be able to talk to them about running a direct line, though this will probably cost about $10k or more just to get the line run to your home.