As IPv4 exhaustion rendered the original allocation role of Regional Internet Registries obsolete, a recurring question emerged: should RIRs continue to exist, and if so, in what form? Various alternatives have been proposed—state control, intergovernmental bodies, or treaty-based institutions modeled after organizations like the IAEA. All of these proposals share the same flaw: they attempt to solve a simple technical problem by adding political and bureaucratic complexity.

At its core, a registry solves a trivial problem. It is a book that records one fact: which network uses which number. Technically, this is not complex. The difficulty lies entirely in global coordination. There is no international law, no treaty, and no sovereign obligation requiring networks to recognize RIRs. They are followed purely by voluntary consensus, because historically everyone chose to accept the same book. That de-facto consensus is what gave registries power—not law.

Centralisation is precisely what turned a small database into a hundred-million-dollar institution with thousands of meetings, political disputes, and governance failures. Centralised systems require consensus; consensus requires politics; politics inevitably leads to capture, conflict, and instability. Moving registry authority further into governmental or intergovernmental structures would not fix this—it would amplify it by adding legal and geopolitical layers to an already fragile construct.

A decentralised model removes the problem at its root. If each network holds its own cryptographic proof—its own record or token—representing its number resources, global uniqueness can be guaranteed by the ledger itself rather than by a central authority. The system becomes simpler, not more complex. Coordination becomes technical, not political.

This model does not weaken sovereignty; it strengthens it. Governments retain full authority within their borders. If national law demands central control, regulators can require operators to place their registrations under state management. If the law favors private responsibility, networks can operate independently. The key difference is that enforcement happens locally, under sovereign law, rather than through a foreign or supranational private institution. Decentralisation restores autonomy instead of undermining it.

Centralised international systems inevitably fail under political stress. History shows that when geopolitical conflict arises, shared institutions fracture, and innocent users bear the cost. The Internet is now a critical utility—on par with electricity and water. Subjecting its stability to political turbulence is reckless. A decentralised ledger, by design, contains failure. One region’s crisis does not propagate globally.

The choice is therefore clear. Either we keep layering bureaucracy onto a system never designed for today’s economic and political weight, or we remove the band-aids entirely and let networks govern themselves within their legal environments. Bad actors will exist in any system, but decentralisation allows the network to route around them naturally without granting anyone global coercive power.

The Regional Internet Registry model was not built for the present value and strategic importance of number resources. Expanding it will not save it. Simplifying it—by decentralising ownership, authority, and responsibility—is the only path that scales.

That is not ideology. It is systems engineering.