[members-discuss] Administrative procedures within RIPE NCC: Any way to soften it ?

Dear Clement, all

Thank you for sharing your concerns and apologies for the late reply.

We recognise that providing documentation can take a lot of time and keeps you from your real work. However, we need to be clear on exactly who the resource holder is - to prevent hijacks as you note, but also to avoid legal disputes over the resources in the future. This is a risk when company structures are changing or companies are being spun off, and untangling this to see what is actually changing is not always straightforward.

Our transfer procedure was updated after a board resolution in 2016 which stated that all transfers, including mergers and acquisitions, must follow the RIPE transfer policy unless supported by documentation from a national authority[1]. This closed a well-known and abused loophole that members were using to transfer resources outside of the policy.

The other important point to note here is that under Dutch law, memberships are not transferrable. What we therefore need to establish in these cases is whether a separate legal entity is receiving the resources. If this is indeed what's happening, they will need to become a member. This is because a non-member cannot receive resources and they are not able to assume the membership of the company they are getting the resources from. Of course, if the receiving party is already a member, they will not have to open an additional membership to acquire the resources.

Finally, it is worth noting that we have invested quite a lot of effort into improving our due diligence processes. We have recently developed an approach that should ease a lot of the burden for members in terms of documentation. We will share some more details about this in the near future.

Regards

Athina Fragkouli
Chief Legal Officer 
RIPE NCC

[1] RIPE NCC Members and Multiple LIR Accounts - Decisions and Next Steps:
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-announce/2016-April/001031.html