CEO of LARUS Limited and founder of the LARUS Foundation. He works at the intersection of Internet infrastructure, IP address markets, and global Internet governance, drawing on direct involvement across all five Regional Internet Registries. These notes aim to clarify how number resources are governed in practice and advance a more accountable, resilient framework for critical IP assets.
Regional Internet Registries collectively employ hundreds of staff worldwide and operate with annual budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, all funded by mandatory membership fees. This funding model exists because RIRs hold a de-facto monopoly over the registration of number resources. The question is whether this scale of expenditure is justified by their actual function.
At its core, an RIR performs one task: maintaining a registration database. That database is small—on the order of a few gigabytes—and technically trivial to operate. In isolation, this is not a complex or expensive function. The reason RIRs grew large lies in history. In the 1990s, they were tasked with fairly distributing IPv4 addresses, which required hostmasters to assess need and prevent abuse. Over decades, as that role diminished, the institutions expanded sideways: training programs, global conferences, travel-heavy community meetings, and large administrative structures.
The result is a mismatch between function and cost. Every Internet user, via their ISP, effectively pays a compulsory fee to five private organizations simply to obtain an IP address. This functions like a global tax on connectivity. When a cost is compulsory and universal, the ethical expectation is minimization. In practice, the opposite has happened. Like many bureaucratic systems, monopoly power has enabled expansion rather than restraint.
This burden falls disproportionately on the poorest users. A child in a rural school in Southeast Asia, living on a dollar a day, indirectly contributes to funding international travel, conferences, and administrative overhead they will never benefit from. In some regions, registries spend millions annually just moving staff across continents to attend meetings, while operators in remote areas struggle to justify the basic fees required to stay connected.
Many members are unaware of this imbalance. They know the registry provides IP addresses, but few realize how much of the budget goes to non-core activities. In some cases, the actual cost of maintaining the registry function has been a small fraction of total expenditure, with the majority consumed by conferences, communications, and institutional self-maintenance.
This is not sustainable or just. Essential infrastructure should be lean, predictable, and focused strictly on its mandate. Members—especially those in underserved regions—should question where their fees go, participate in governance, and vote accordingly. Accountability is the minimum requirement. The longer-term question is whether such centralized, high-cost institutions are needed at all in the future.
At the very least, registry governance must confront a simple reality: critical Internet infrastructure should not be financed by extracting maximum rent from the most remote and least powerful users on the planet.
