They certainly can disappear into thin air due to a variety of reasons. Given the dollar amount that v4 netblocks seem to change hands at these days..
--srs ________________________________ From: Nick Hilliard <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, 02 August 2026 15:56:01 To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]> Cc: Serge Droz <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Security-wg] Re: Abuse mailboxes are increasingly no longer monitored and are being replaced by (bad) forms Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote on 01/08/2026 16:31: > That suggests that some capacity building is in order. They have what > is effectively a fiduciary duty to IP space. > > So they can no more not develop competence in this than a bank manager > can disclaim all competence in assessing whether a loan that they > disburse is going to be repaid or not, used for illegal activity or not > etc. Suresh, the RIPE NCC has a fiduciary duty to registration of IP space. How those number resources are used is an issue for the courts and the law. Your comparison with the bank manager is inapplicable for a lot of reasons, the main ones being that a bank is not a registration authority and - unlike money - an IP address isn't at risk of disappearing into thin air when the holder walks out the front door. If you want to claim that the bank manager is still on the hook to do some due diligence to ensure that it's not obviously being used for illegal activity, there's no problem pulling out another somewhat inapplicable comparison and say that road / motorway operators don't seem to be bound by any sort of due diligence for use of their resources, and knowingly allow their roads to be used for all sorts of crimes, many heinous. There are plenty of situations in society where abuse of a resource or a registration can cause harm and where we don't require any sort of due diligence: cutlery vendors don't check their customer out if someone walks in to buy a carving knife; the IEEE isn't on the hook if their MAC addresses are used in NICs which are used for network abuse, and so forth. The point is not that that you can't invoke comparisons of dubious comparative value with other organisations or societal structures, it's that the RIPE NCC is in something of a unique position, being a registration organisation for a large number of countries for numbers which are used for international communications. We don't have a direct analogue anywhere else. Nick
----- To unsubscribe from this mailing list or change your subscription options, please visit: https://mailman.ripe.net/mailman3/lists/security-wg.ripe.net/ As we have migrated to Mailman 3, you will need to create an account with the email matching your subscription before you can change your settings. More details at: https://www.ripe.net/membership/mail/mailman-3-migration/
