Stenography Transcript

RIPE General Meeting.

May 20, 2026.

ONDREJ FILIP: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ondrej Philip and I am here to start one of the best part of this meeting which is called the general assembly of RIPE NCC so again I am Ondrej Philip and chairman of the executive board and my fellow board members, I will introduce them later, we also invited them of course Hans Petter Holen as CEO and Athina, the legal council and Simon‑Jan, chief financial officers because I think we expect a lot of financial questions during this meeting because finance is the most important agenda I would say.

So let me show you the whole agenda. Before that of course, yeah, I have some administrative matters, first of all I appointed as a Secretary of this general meeting, Athina Fragouli, that's why she's in front of you. Also I would like to remind you that there will be draft minutes published to two working days after the General Meeting which is Tuesday the 26th May and then awe members will have three weeks to submit a notice of objection to the minutes. There will be tool that will collect those objections and the system will be available on the day the minutes are published, again, May 26 and unless the executive board receives a notice of objection signed by at least a hundred members within three weeks of publication of the draft minutes, the draft minutes of the meeting will be final and binding.

Also I would like to remind you there's an official photographer of the meeting, please don't use your cameras, we have a photograph, we have a lot of records of this meeting, please don't use yours and now the agenda.

So the agenda was circulated on April 15th. There were actually no comments to the agenda so the agenda is final and binding. We have ten points to go through. First is welcome and preliminaries. That's what I'm currently doing.

Then we will have a report from the RIPE NCC, delivered by Hans Petter, then I will deliver the report from the Executive Board, then I have my really favourite point which I really like to present, that's the discharge of the Executive Board, then Simonian will present the adoption of the RIPE NCC financial report. And then Simonian and Raymond, the treasury of the board, will together present the RIPE NCC charging scheme.

I am sure that's going to be very a quick point. We could jump easily to the Executive Board elections, it will be more videos of the candidates so you can see for the last home the candidates and then you can decide, who you will vote for.

And then... will help me with presenting the vote systems and I will reads the resolution Lous, at that point we will interrupt the General Meeting and we will... and I will just read the resolution of the voting. So that is the plan. And without further ado, I am asking Hans Petter Holen to come to the stage with his report.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Thank you very much, Ondrej. So to give you a very brief overview of what we have been doing the last year, I have taken the annual report and my colleagues have turned it into slides and I will now briefly flick through it and show you the highlights here.

Don't try to read the slides, go and read the annual report instead, if you want to see all the details.

So I will touch on membership overview, the registry Information Services, external engagement and community and then wrapping up inside the RIPE NCC. So what what was the main themes of what we did last year, strengthening, security and compliance and enhances trust and transparency and multi‑stakeholder engagement and sustainable operations, they were the four highlights of what 2025 was like for us.

You can see here on the timeline all the activities that we have been doing, releasing API keys in the database in January, all the government engagements, all the user interface improvements, all the events and so on through the whole year.

So I could really just show you this page and say this is all what we did: The membership overview, we are slightly more than 20,000 active LIRs, we are slightly ‑‑ that's than 20,000 active members. We still have new LIRs coming in, 874, and we have members from 120 countries. So not only from our service region but also outside of our service region. Top three countries, Germany, Britain and Russia, our members ‑‑ our new members, germ neat, Britain and TR, is that turkey, maybe it is.

And then LIRs by country, Germany, Britain and Russia, so it's very appropriate that we are here in Britain on the top of the map.

The registry we still do some IPv4 allocations, that's from the waiting list. The major growth opportunity for you guys in building networks should be in IPv6 and we still do that, one of the things we are really proud of is the customer satisfaction, the NPS, can you recommend our services to others, which scores really world class level 89. So I think that's really good to see and really thanks to the registry team for that.

Transfers, that also keeps us busy. Britain, Germany, the Netherlands are topping that. One thing to look at inter RIR transfers at the RIPE here, you will see that the inflow of addresses, 10 million from ARIN while in total 1.4 million outflow from the RIPE NCC service region so you know, a lot of this is legacy so thinking about that going forward, there is a lot of legacy space that is being transferred into Europe so that's the main source of new V4 addresses to grow the network today. Assisted registry checks, to keep the registry up to date, we do assisted registry checks and try to touch all the members every five years, that's 200, 250 a month, going forward and we managed to do 2,800 last year which is actually 400 more than the year before.

It's good to see that Abuse‑C role objects are created and are updated, that's an important attribute in the registry, you have told us, and it's important that that, that you keep that updated.

We also validate Abuse‑C email addresses, and that also requires some manual intervention when you look at these numbers.

Reports and investigations, we have some security incidents from time to time, luckily non‑priority one or two in 2025, but we have quite some hijacking investigations are where somebody reports to us that there are hijacks, 220 of those, 19 have resulted in reports to the police, so do not send us fraudulent documents, we will report that to the police. And 13 have resulted in due diligence warnings, so one disputed transfer, one new membership application blocked because untruthful application was provided to us, and then three service agreements have been terminated due to untruthful information.

So it's important to bear in mind that this is something that we think ‑‑ takes seriously, we are told to keep a registry up to date and the papers you submit to us should be proper and legal.

Information Services, security and applications was security and authentication was one of the top priority in our business applications team, the LIR portal and operational support, that's the main interface you use to keep your information up to date, registry data and statistics and data infrastructure and automation were their top four priorities in the year that passed.

On RPKI, we see a steady uptake, we would have wished it to grow further than 25% but I still think that's good. RPKI certificates and ROAses are also increasing, and I think it's really cool to see even though we launched ASPA at the end of the la year, we have 1.19% usage of that. Of course, that's something that we should bring up to the 75% or even 100% in order to secure routing even better than today.

RIPE database updates: Improve security, removing the MD5 hash passwords finally in mid January, we concluded that. Improve resilience, mobilise deployment and improve and implement new things. And the database team, as many of the other teams, has really worked a lot on the ISO 27001 controls so we can achieve our certificates at the end of the year or the beginnings of next year.

RIPE Atlas measurement network, the world's biggest, 14.4,000 probes that you can use, not that many hardware probes shipped, we are struggling with finding a supplier that can provide this at a reasonable price and other hardware prices are going through the roof. But luckily we can use virtual probes. Our researchers are saying that the anchors who are bigger probes, more powerful, they run the full mesh measurements continuously, it's much more valuable data, we have seen a good improvement in those.

And then you can look at all the number of users and measurements happening here. And I think, I was told in a meeting yesterday that we have a lot of very interesting data in all the measurements, it's just how do we find it and actually figure out what it means. So I think that's a very interesting research challenge if you know any students out there that wants to dig into that.

Other tools, path analysis, internet maps, reachability testing, we have launched new functionality, multi‑paths visualisation and probe connectivity and a member overview are things that have been developed over the last year.

And I tend to say we do numbers and not do names, which is not quite true because we operate one of the 13 internet route name servers, K‑root and if you wonder why it's called K‑root, you can ask our founder shall Daniel Karrenberg.

The route server system is amazingly resilient, 13 letters on the 12 operators and no more than 2,000 instances around the world, so it's a massively distributed system.

RIPE state looking into all the data that we have, we have released a new user interface, we have improved many widgets and dug out a lot of functionality that we had that were hidden and then modernised application code end libraries and moved to containers which is important for future maintenance.

RIS, kept a stable number of RIS peers to limit the data growth while adding several route server sessions, also done quite some maintenance on this and shared approach on how to make and RIS data more accessible.

External engagement on community, we have done Hackathons, regional meetings, RIPE meetings, training courses, and round table meetings and tried to spread them across our service region, because it's important to meet our members where they are, rather than everybody having to come to north western Europe to participate in our meetings.

Here you can see a brief overview of the in‑person trainings and webinars, so we do trainings the gold old way; we use ‑‑ kind of sit in a classroom and have a personal trainer that takes you through the material. We also do webinars, so you don't have to travel or the trainer doesn't have to travel.

And we have RIPE Academy, you can consume the learning experience fully online. And certified professionals, still a popular thing and we see that the number of exams completed has gone from 582 to 656, it's not extremely high numbers but it's clear that there is still is an interest for this as a proof of completing the education.

Policy development, four policy proposals under discussion, 55‑plus people have participated in the discussions, that would be a shout out to out to all members, please participate in them, from ten plus countries, one policy proposals accepted, none of them withdrawn and three still ongoing.

Public policy, public authority engagement, we have done round tables in EUs, southeast Europe and the Middle East, we have responded to public poll so see consultations and participated in internet governance events such as World Summit of Information Society and last year was really busy year with the renewal of the IGF mandate and all the work around that.

Supporting the community, we have a RIPE fellowship where we bring new people into the meetings to increase diversity and renew the community and you can see here the number of fellows that we have had permitting and we had a strong focus here on the central Asia, which is an area that we rather recently you can see CAP 5, we haven't been having that many meetings in that region. And we also have an academic corporation initiative where we bring in academics to present and participate in the meetings.

Open house events, so sometimes we feel there is a matter that needs discussing between any of these meetings, so we organise online open house; the role of IXPs in southeast Europe, strategy from 27 to 31, draft activity plan and budget for 2026 and a new chapter for the RIPE fellowship, we changed that programme in a substantial way and the second consultation on the RIR govern document also known as ICP‑2. We supported NOG and regional Es, really the internet happens by engineers at home in their countries, bringing them together in the metric operations groups, we have sponsored CSNOG, netNOG, ITNOG and so on and so on.

So that's really important work that we do to bring also people from these communities then to the regional and to the RIPE meetings.

Yeah, I have already mentioned southeast Europe, CIPr, MENOG, really high scores on these events, they really appreciate it, we had internet measurements day in Tajikstan; we had RIPE 90 in Lisbon, 741 attendees. And we had the RIPE 90 in Bucharest in Romania, 597 attendees. And I think this one is here in Edinburgh today is going to be record high because we have more than this checked in already.

RIPE Labs, that's an open platform for network operators, researchers and developers and others to to post and share ideas across the internet and here you can see the top articles and also we have competitions and there are winners drawn from this. So 107 articles in total, 57 by non‑staff, it's not only RIPE NCC staff presentations, it's also you that can publish there.

Data story telling, turning raw data into insight in publications. And yeah, a lot more. Looking at the heart of the RIPE NCC, we were 184.8 FTEs, so of course we don't have a 00.8 staff member, some people work part‑time, that's why there are point something here. We are not quite 50/50 on male and female distribution, 40‑60 is not that bad for the industry I would say. 47 nationalities. So it's an incredibly diverse work environment. So that is really cool. And the turnover of 5.4% is also really low, so it seems that my colleagues really like to keep working for us.

Yeah, and we also see that the average age stays the same or goes slightly down, so we are able to actually hire young colleagues to replace those of us who are getting older and greyer.

General Meeting, you can see here the member turn out and the registered votes, I think for this meeting we are up to more than 3,000 registered votes now so for some reason, there is much more interest in, I guess, one specific topic on this agenda today.

Legal confirmation work compliance and transparency, this kind of says it all, there is so much more work that we have to do on the legal side. And new legislation that is coming our way.

Sanctions is, unfortunately, something that we still have to deal with, publishing quarterly reports so you can see how that develops and how we are dealing with that.

Compliance efforts, a lot of these laws and regulations require us to do a risk assessment, put in place the necessary controls and we have chosen to do all of that through an information security system. So we are now working to have that certified according to ISO 27,001 which is an natural standard and have all the controls necessary from for instance NIS2 as part of that system so that we can provide a report saying that yes, we are actually fulfilling our obligations.

For the RPKI service, we have taken, put the bar even higher and gone for a SOC2 report that we have passed, SOC2 type 2, that's checked the controls through the whole year. So that's quite some impressive work done by the teams operating the RPKI service on the services they they are dependent on.

If you want to look at the budget and expenses, you can see have more look here but then Simian will present it in more detail later on, if you want the high‑level glossy overview of that, we have that on one page for you and the overview on cost per activity can give you a rough idea that for instance DNS K‑root costs us around a million to operate. So you know you can see that in proportion to other costs.

And that was it. So I don't know if there are any questions.

Because if there are, you can go and read the full annual report and hopefully find the answer there.

Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

ONDREJ FILIP: I expected you would make it from here a bit hard but you know, no question, thank you for that.

With that I will start the report from the RIPE NCC Executive Board. First of all let me introduce the six extremely talented people and then me. I am here, I am Ondrej Philip, chair of the Executive Board and next is Peter Strzyweski, the Secretary and Raymond Jetten, treasurer of the board, Maria Hall, Harald Summa, Steffan Sander and last but definitley not least ‑‑ Sander Steffan, I apologise; I do it all the time ‑‑ and last but not least, Randy Bush, so thank you very much. You can see the pictures, you can see them physically. By the way we took a lot of pictures of the board, I think some of them are suspect are trying to start a career as a fashion model, I think they will be very successful with that.

We are not just concentrating on pictures, we had a very busy time between the last General Meeting and this one. We met basically almost every month. If you think there is a space in generator, I have to say, unfortunately, we had a board training, it was not an official meeting; we saw each other also during January. As you can see it was five meetings, three physical and two virtual.

Minutes of each meeting is published under URL, you can see on the screen, if you are interested you can look at it and you can read all the details because all minutes are quite detailed.

Of course doing those many meetings we amended a lot of documents and approved a lot of resolutions so let's start with that. The first document we amended was the RIPE NCC treasury statute. As you may remember, we informed you that we changed our investing partner and with that we also got some advice how to amend the strategies that was reflected in the change. Also we amended closure of members, the registration of internet resources and legacy internet resource procedure. Basically, the main point of this change, except polishing of the text, was to ‑‑ the removal of the reminder sent by registered post because I think we are in the 21st century and this is not necessary, we all can read emails, so that was the main point of this change.

And third document, the RIPE NCC Executive Board approves the proposed amendment to RIPE NCC certification service terms and conditions and RIPE NCC publish in parent and repository terms and conditions.

Again this was ‑‑ this grants the RIPE NCC to revoke resource certificate associated with long time non‑functional certificate authorities, so that's more technical change in this field.

Also, we passed a lot of resolutions, one of them was that we created a code of conduct team for the Executive Board elections, a little bit different than the last elections. We asked the members of the current RIPE code of conduct team who are not RIPE staff or don't declare a conflict of interest and with that we have that six volunteers, so it's Sebastian Becker, Florian had I been letter and Franziska Lichtblau and Robert Lister and Cynthia Listrom and David Verolme, let me thank them for their work.

I truly hope we are not need them but just in case, they are ready.

Also we approved the risk appetite statement in our meeting number 189. It was a slight change, we have very conservative how we accept risk but we are a little bit changed terminology from low to cautious. We also approved the RIPE NCC activity plan and budget for this year. It was based on the presentation during the last GM and we included input so thanks very much for that and we approved the budget and published. And also RIPE again published for people that wished to become arbiters of according to section 22 B of Tthe RIPE NCC Conflict of arbiter procedure. This needs a little bit more explanation.

We asked volunteers to join the arbiters panel following the expire racial of the term of Keith Mitchell this year, with this expiration, the number of arbiters was nine. So currently we have nine arbiters. And the minimum is seven and maximum is 15, so that's why we have six positions.

The original intention was to have this General Meeting to approve the volunteers but we got 12 eligible volunteers and it was really tough to decide. So we would like to change it a little bit, we would like to have some elections and a run of voting so we need sometime for preparation, what we will do is at the October General Meeting, because also the election process might have been slightly different from what the volunteers expected so we need to be sure that we are fine with the procedure and we will have an instant run of votes at the General Meeting. So that's something you can expect next time but still we are fine with the amount of arbiters.

But I said one name and I think it deserves some recognition because Keith Mitchell was elected in I think more than 20 years ago. So let me thank you for him ‑‑ for that.

(APPLAUSE.)

This is not the first time I am thanking Keith for the work he was doing, we met in DNS when I was a chair and he was the president and I was the Chair and also Keith was the Chair of the Executive Board in 1997, so I am sympathetic for the people who went through the same misery as I am going through now. So thank you very much Keith for your dedication, thank you so much.

(APPLAUSE.)

We made two financial resolutions for Hans Petter, paying for this meeting and also paying for health insurance costs for the employees was above the limit that we approved to so we made authorisation for him. So that's two other resolutions and also we approved the submission of the audited financial report for 2025 and we expect at this General Meeting to adopt it.

Also we approved the annual report and also the public, we directed the publication of it. And also of course we approved the publication of the draft agenda of this General Meeting.

Also we made a one resolution which might be not to so clear, let me spend a few words words about it. I will read it first and then try to explain, the RIPE NCC Executive Board in order to formalised current practice resolves to change its governance struck tower to a one tear board consisting of executive members of the current management team, the managing director and the non‑executive directors and the members of the current executive board. Further the RIPE NCC executive board instructs the RIPE NCC managing director to prepare the r relevant amendments to the articles of association for the board's review and approval, subject to approval by the board, the amendments shall be submitted as a proposal for adoption by the General Meeting to be held in October 2026 at the earlest." So basically we spent sometime and it was also for example within the topic of the Executive Board training in January, how to improve the current governance structure of the organisation.

The main concern which triggered the whole story was that the Executive Board doesn't actually apply to us as we are more non‑executive people and we delegate all the executive responsibility to the CEO. So we are Executive Board consists of non‑ executors, which doesn't sound good, so we basically wanted to formalis the current practice that we are a group of non‑executives and are kind of controlling the executive director, so we want to formalise the current practice, how it is, but calling us executive board sounds ‑‑ so that means the primary responsibility for the daily management of RIPE NCC and the corresponding officially shifts from the Executive Board to the management team and the non‑executive directors will supervise the executive director. Again this is, although is sounds like a huge change; in reality, it's just reflects the reality how we kind of operate, we do not expect any huge changes for you. It will also align our governance with the mod he is of the other areas so we will have roughly the same structure as others.

And this is not subject of this General Meeting, it's just kind of pre‑warning, we will definitely discuss it very openly and widely with you. We will propose the amendments of the articles of association and that will be subject of the next General Meeting.

So nothing has to be done today, it's just what we are working on to warn you in advance and also we would like to make the change the way that it wouldn't amend the way we currently operate, so there will be again elections to the non‑Executive Board board members, Hans Petter as CEO, so no change in the way you interact with the RIPE NCC as members.

So that's the plan.

And last but not least and it's definitely a topic of today, we also approved the submission of the charging scheme, I am sure you are all looking forward to discussing that. So that's it. And then we also approved the document ghost of the RIPE NCC clearing house reserve and we also direct its pull cation, I think it got number 860 so you can read the document and it explanation how work with work with the current results so look at it if you are interested.

We also discussed a lot of important topics, RIPE NCC strategy obviously, I think most of you saw Hans Petter's preparation today. We didn't hear much of the comments but anyway thank you at least for that one that came. If you have some farther comments, let us know of course. I already mentioned the board governance and structure, we had a joint meeting with the APNIC board in Jakarta so before and after, we had some preparation and also some debriefing and we discussed a lot of topics related to the IRR governance, joint internet number registry, ICP‑2 of course was the focus of interest.

Also we discussed very intensively the IT improvements, that was part of Hans Petter's presentation during the NCC working group. We discussed how to improve the current working conditions, we would like to attract most talented people we could and of course making a nice work environment for them it's also our interest.

Then also to mention the goals of the RIPE NCC clearing house, and for, I think it wasn't discussed for a long time, but we also to discussed the governance of the root server system and the operation of K‑root. It was more of a small reminder for us that we have also this part of RIPE NCC functions although they are mostly no issues with that, so we don't have to have it during board meetings, so it was more kind of reminder that everything is perfect in that sense.

So basically what I want to say, we are continuing building a stable future for the RIPE NCC. We will continue the work on the governance structure, we cooperate intensively with Hans Petter Holen to ensure good information sharing and we are fulfilling corporate governance and fiduciary responsibles, we would like to hear your feedback.

There are currently three topics that we requested feedback, we are getting some feedback and there's still some space to comment, one of them is RIPE NCC strategy. I already mentioned there was not much said during NCC working group so please look at it and let us know. Charging scheme, that was the opposite, it was heavily discussed in various channels, we get a lot of feedback around this topic and then activity plan and budget which will be a topic of the next General Meeting.

You can talk now, you can talk with us informally at the social events, you can of course use mailing list and if there's something important like, for example, charging scheme or the change of the articles, we organise open houses so you are encouraged to attend those.

We know there's some unofficial community channels and those are not monitored by all of us so just if you have some chat in somewhere, whatever chatting application, it might not be seen by us, so please make sure if you have something important you use some of the official channels.

Also one thing might be confusing for you. If I receive some feedback, I usually don't answer immediately. There's a thing we need to accommodate a diverse use of all members and it's ‑‑ that's probably one of the most complicated part of our work because you are 20,000 people, of course not all of you are active, but we need to accommodate the use of all of you. And also we would like to speak one voice, so if I have something to discuss I need to go to my fellow board members and discuss it also, maybe we ask for some feedback from the staff. So it might take sometime. The fact that we don't respond immediately doesn't mean we are not working on it.

And then we respond by usually single message, might be, for example, email from me or something like that, on behalf of the whole board, with input from the staff. So we cannot respond quickly but if you respond, we believe it has some importance.

But all of the conversation you have with us, we discuss it, it's never forgotten.

So, that's it. Question? Comments?

PETER HESSLER: Peter Hessler from the CCC. I want to thank you very much for your suggestions on the NCC governance and the Executive Board/non‑Executive Board migrations. That topic has been a minor sort of concern for some of the members and it's great to see this is being addressed and we look forward to seeing the details.

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you. I didn't expect thanks, but yeah, thank you. Ulka?

ULKA ATHELE: We have a speaker online who requested the floor. Could the tech team please... I think they might have raised their hand accidentally. So if you are intending to ask your question, you can reenter queue but they have left the queue, thank you.

ONDREJ FILIP: OK. So I don't see anyone running to the microphone, so thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE.)

The next agenda point is me again. I like it because it's my favourite because it took me a while to understand it and I am not sure if I fully understand it, but anyway.

I have much smarter people around me to explain it, that's easy then.

So the next agenda point is called discharge of the Executive Board and my colleagues prepared a very simple consistency for me which I think will be understandable for you, by discharging the Executive Board, you say that their actions as described in the annual financial report 2025 have not damaged the association. I think that's a brilliant consistency, we should use it, there's much broader explanation under the link you can see and there's also a video that Athina creed during RIPE 8 in Krakow, she explained completely the whole story behind this. Basically you don't say we are great people, you just say that the actions we describe in the annual report didn't damage the association. That's all you express by this voting.

Are there any questions? Seeing that everybody is preparing for the financial stuff. So then I will not delay it and I will ask Simon‑Jan to come and have the presentation about financial report 2025.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK:

Hello all, my name isSimon‑Jan Haytink CFO at the RIPE NCC, it's my 11th time presenting at the General Meeting, I have a long story, let's get into it, I am proud to share that we have another clean opinion from the auditors, EY.

This means that in their opinion our financial statements give a true and fair view of the financial position of the RIPE NCC at the 31st December, 2025.

I would like to give a big thanks to the finance team back in Amsterdam as you are the ones doing all the real work.

My key message for this presentation. The 2025 financial report shows consolidated numbers and r company financial statements of 2025, a change in accounting from income from ultra high‑risk countries, a shift from assets to cash in bank. Income was over budget but we do see continued decline in LIRs, the number of members however remains stable. Costs have been under budget. Personnel costs on budget while the FTE averages are under, all in all resulting in a redistribution. The return on the clearing house reserves was lower than expected.

The outlook for is 41.1 million euro for both income and expenditure.

A quick recap of the financial strategy. We have a not for profit funding model, it aims to generate sufficient income to fulfil our obligations in a stable and predictable manner and we are committed to maintaining a low risk profile.

The financial update.

Our financial performance indicators, all green and close to budget, except the financial result which has been 33% below budget.

The financial story in a nutshell, income over budget with 664,000 euro, costs under 140,000 K, a positive operating result of 2.8 million euro and positive financial result of 538,000, a surplus of 3.4 million euro and we redistributed 2.8 million euro to our members on the 2026 invoices.

A zero euro corporate income tax payable position and an overall surplus of 622,000 euros which has been added to our clearing house reserves.

Our balance sheet. Overall a stable balance sheet yet again. The major movement has been from current receivables to cash at bank, this shift is explained by the liquidation of our previous investment portfolio.

To zoom in on the receivables, first we see significant reduction in miscellaneous receivables, this is explained by our decision to no longer record the income we cannot collect from ultra high‑risk countries on the balance sheet, as year over year, this number increases our balance sheet value and collecting these incomes remain highly uncertain, we now report this position on page 32 of the financial report under arrangements and commitments not shown in the balance sheet.

This better reflects the high degree of uncertainty as it is no longer part of our balance sheet.

Second we see a 12 million euro reduction in short‑term investments. As it is known some re ‑‑ which has been moved to cash with banks as the majority of our portfolio has been liquidated. This is the result from changing our investment partner which meant selling our portfolio and transferring the money to our current accounts.

Moving on to our income.

Total income for 2025 has been 39 million euro, or 5% under budget. Before redistribution, this was 41.8 million and 1.6% over budget.

Annual fees were 40.3 million and 2% over budget. Sign up fees at 0.8 million and 35% over budget.

A. RIPE meeting income at 252K and 16% under budget.

And lastly other income, which is mainly sponsorship, 453K and 24% under budget.

New LIR accounts and closures. New LIR accounts development has been stable compared to 2024, 874 new LIR accounts. LIR account closures are lower than in 2024 with 1,218 compared to 1,536 in 2024, overall we see the number of members are stable around the 20,000 mark, ending 2025 with 19,863.

While the number of LIRs are slowly reducing over time and at 20,647 at year end.

Membership fees at risk. Unfortunately no real update from the previous General Meeting presentation; we continue to do what we can but I do not see any solution available any time soon.

To quantify this membership fees at risk, overall at year‑end this is 6 million euro. The 5.2 million of ultra high‑risk country we report off balance as mentioned earlier, sanction‑led income is invoiced when the LIR is confirmed free of sanctions. And Ukraine is invoiced and extensions are granted upon request.

Expenditures 2025. Total expenditure has been 38.9 million euro or 3% under budget. Payroll and personnel expenses, 24.3 million, 0.3% or 79K under budget. FTE total was 8.6 below budget, based on the FTE being below budget, you would expect the associated costs to follow that trend.

We, however, had severance cases which are always unfortunate but also reality of running an association.

These costs are partly offset by considerable amount of received subsidies from maternity‑related leave, we also invested in staff well‑being and speak up initiatives.

And last staff not on leave needed to cope with at additional workload due to the maternity, sick and bonus leave, the total amount of bonuses was increased compared to budget but in line with 2024.

Other operating expenses at 13.7 million, 7% under budget. Depreciation and bad debt 86 K or 4% over budget.

Zooming in on the budget variances. Overall 1 million euro under budget. Over spends have been travel, consultancy an bad debt, significant under spends have been contributions, information technology and outreach and PR. To give some more background, I will share a bit more details.

The registry, 340K, 42 K under budget. Personnel costs under budget and some savings compared to budget on information technology. Information Services, 606,000 euro over budget, a slight overspend in information technology, but a significant overspend in consultancy, the main reason is to cover for staff falling sick as mentioned previously.

External engagement in community, 130 K under budget, the main items here is travel being over budget and travel and PR under. A conscious decision to repurpose theoutreach and PR to travel for more in person engagement, overall the over and under spend have r compensated said each other.

Organisational sustainability. 1.182K under budget. Personnel overspend is due to the before mentioned staff well‑being initiatives. Underspend contributions is the under utilisation of the shared NRO budget, information technology is under spend is related to information security and explained by a shift in priorities and not being able to find the staff they need to execute according to budget.

A slight over spend in travel. And consultancy a significant underspend which has been used by Information Services.

And lastly an overspend in bad debt as we have conservatively accounted for the outstanding invoices in the Ukraine.

The related party transactions 2025. No real change from previous years. But this is a required disclosure meaning if any funds are paid to a related party, we are obliged to disclose this in the financial reports.

Moving on to treasury. We had a positive financial result of 538,000 euro over 2025, this was not as good as 2024 but still positive, interest income was 368,000 euro. Interest in other financial expenses the fees for the former treasury partner of 62,000 euros, at 327,000 result on our financial assets. And 95,000 euro negative result on exchange differences.

Our investment portfolio was 6.2 million at yearend compared to 18.8 million in 2024. Cash with banks is 32.6, compared to 16.1 in 2024. Overall result of 1.6% on our clearing house reserves compared to 2.4% in 2025. Yeah. The result on a portfolio managed by a previous investment partners was was 1.9% in 2025 compared to 4.3 in 2024.

Treasury update, 2025. In Q4 of 2025, we have been fully onboarded with... we instructed the UBS to sell the full portfolio, our old porfoloio in Q4 and transfer the funds to our... acount. The majority of the portfolio have been liquidated and the remainder is almost fully sold as per today. Currently 12.7 million and the remaining 3.8 will be added as soon as the funds are with... the Executive Board approved treasury statute remains leading for our new treasury partner.

Moving on to the overall result.

The 2025 profit and loss which reCAPs the full financial story. The average redistribution for LIR has been 134 euros. The average cost per LIR is at 1,887 euros.

Now, my favourite slide, we are balanced and we are healthy. We have a financial reserve of 33.7 million euro to respond to uncertainties, we are solvent and we are in a robust financial position and with that we are ready for the future. Membership Fiat risk does remain a concern and new treasury partner will allow us to increase the value of the reserve and possibly the capital expense ratio.

A quick outlook to 2026 and beyond.

The 2026 budget is 41.1 million in income costs. The expectation for the Budget 2027 is 42.5 million in income and costs, but it's not set in stone, we still need to start the budget process for 2027.

Next a quick update of the financials per April 2026.

Key messages for 2026.

The budget set to 41.1 million and we do not expect a redistribution over 2026 at this point in time.

Member development remains stable. And the LIR number continues to show small decline. Our Dubai LLC is operational but there's still work to be done. If this LLC can indeed help solving any issues we have, we will take that alone. During this General Meeting, with we have a vote for the charging scheme, pending the outcome, it will have implementation risk, high‑risk continues to be an issue for which we do not have a solution as of yet. And unfortunately we do see continued instability in our service region.

Our financial performance year to date, income 1% under budget, costs are under with 7 and we have more LIR accounts than budgeted at the end of April.

And our financial result is close to the budget.

The financial story so fashion, income 1% under with 140 K, a net increase of 111 LIR accounts and 160 members. Expenditures are 7% under budget at 12.6 million, 191.38 FTE and 5.2 EO Rs at the end of April... surplus is one million euro at the end of April and membership fee remains a concern and a current situation in the Middle East has an impact on this.

Our balance sheet is stable and comparable to April 2025. I added here the balance sheet for the Dutch NCC, RIPE NCC entity, this to allow it to make a judgment on the side of the current operations in the UAE which is small compared to the Dutch entity.

Income details, income at 13.5 million, annual fees at 13.1 and 1% below budget, sign up fees are 225,000 euro, 13% over budget.

RIPE meeting income at zero as this event is in period five, other income is at 149 K and 25% under budget, being mainly sponsorship.

A quick overview of the new LIR account enclosures, my expectation is the trend from 2025 will continue into 2026.

Payment behaviour. As always we can report positive payment behaviour. With 98.4% of all invoices paid.

We do still see payments coming in from Ukraine, for 2025 and earlier.

And I do still expect a 1.6% of outstanding invoices to go down, as repayment of opening fee and LIR account can keep their membership active.

Individual payment extensions, I am listing the countries of individual payment extensions requested have been approved, Ukraine in total have 63.

Membership fee at risk, at this point in time it's just over 7.8 million euro, an increase of 1.9 compared to 2025, the majority is from ultra high‑risk countries, for which I do not see any short‑term solution, but we will keep on investigating.

2026 expenditure overview, total expenditure 12.6 million and 7% under budget. Payroll and personnel expenses, 8.1 million and 5% under budget. FTE are 8.2 or 4% under budget and EO R account is on budget.

Other operate to go expenses are at 4.2 million and 10% under budget. Depreciation and bad debts at 328,000 and 7% over budget.

Zooming in on the budget variances. As per April, we are 894,000 euro under budget. All cost categories except consultancy and depreciation under budget. Consultancy, we use consultants to ensure work can continue in case of sick or maternity leave results in the over spend you see on consultancy, the appreciation is over but only slightly looking at the big picture.

Moving on to treasury, overall unreal leased positive financial result of 244,000 euro to date, of this, returned 121,000 is interest income, the increase on interest income is due to AB Amro offering us the first year of portfolio management free of free, we have a positive result on your investment portfolio and lastly, a 70K euro positive result on exchanges differences.

A quick overview of the portfolio, we started in January 2026, with a year to date return of 0.13%, other the first three full months, February and April have been positive, unfortunately March was not a good month as markets react to the uncertainty created by the situation in the Middle East.

The current situation with UBS, recently almost all alternative investments have been liquidated, at this moment we still have 59 K in alternative investments. 3.8 million euro on the current account will be transferred to the AB Amro very soon and there's 1.25% on this portfolio since the start of 2026 and these funds will be add the pot portfolio when the funds are in. Moving on to the overall results.

2026 April profit and loss figures. I present here three P&L figures. The first are the stated numbers in which we eliminate all inter‑company transactions, the second one is the RIPE NCC NL entity and the third one is the RIPE NCC Middle East F Z LLC.

The 2026 full year forecast, at this point in time I do not see any reason to share a forecast that differs from the 2026 budget.

That being said, there are proposals for significant investments. Which if approved by the Executive Board could well increase the costs and potentially put us over budget. And now my favourite slide for the second timement we remain balanced and healthy, a clearing house buffer of 33.7 million to respond to uncertainties and we just published a RIPE document describing the goal of the clearing house. We are solvent in a robust position financially, member ship fee at risk remains a concern and our new treasury partner is expected to help increase the value of our reserves.

Back to the financial reports 2025. This will be a resolution the General Meeting will vote on. In short the 2025 financial report gives a true and fair view of our financials as confirmed by external auditors and all this leads me to resolution number 2, the General Meeting adopts RIPE NCC financial reports 2025. And voting will take place under agenda point nine.

And with that, I open the floor for any possible questions or comments.

SPEAKER: Schaeffer, cloud and heat technologies asks regarding the 2026 budget, is there any estimation of how much the IT budget will be affected by the steep rise in hardware prices and related prices in recent months?

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: I do not have a clear estimate on how much that will increase, but we are doing a significant research together with our interim CTO and Hans Petter on the possible investment so we'll get some more details from that research.

SPEAKER: I can't... all right, so regarding the ultra high‑risk countries, do you have any data on like how much ‑‑ I assume that some of the members might have shut down while they still have multiple years of repayments, do you have any data how much money has been like lost for good that from that category?

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: I do not have those exact numbers, what our plan is is to record all outstanding items, we will try and invoice them but we have to be realistic and the significant part, we will never be able to collect.

SPEAKER: I understand that but it would be interesting for maybe the next one or something to have like data on like how much has been like I guess written off or whatever.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: OK, I think that's, we can do that.

SPEAKER: Joab snideers. We are presented with a choice, charging scheme model A or B and I guess I am sort of asking your crystal ball skills here. I think there's some kind of possibility that if model B is chosen, the categorised model, there will be an influx of new members because the barrier to join the association has become lower. And I saw in your predictions that you're ‑‑ well, sort of anticipating a continuation of the existing growth curve, which made me think like, I don't think you may in the slight, are separating consequences of A and B. And I was wondering do you have any projections, maybe internal, like if one was chosen over the other, will that affect the ‑‑ is there any data how it will affect the growth of the organisation or the growth of the membership?

HANS PETTER HOLEN: So, I will pick up that question, Joab. If you refer back to Gabor's presentation at the end of the Services Working Group, he gave some numbers on how many holders of PI space there are so one scenario would be that those 10,000 members would work themselves into full members because that would be... we have not budgeted with that, we are not presenting a budget here now. We are looking at that annual report from last year. So depending on the outcome of the vote, we will, of course, make these simulations and those, you know, thoughts for the 2027 budget.

Although we tend to be very conservative on the budgeting side, so I would rather than take that as a positive surprise on the income side which would then give us more money to invest or pay back to members as we usually to do. So we haven't really simulated there but you can find some numbers that give you an indication on the potential in legacy space and the potential in PI holders. And for me this is not about getting the more ‑‑ the RIPE NCC necessary that much more money, but the more people who can split the bill on, it's on everybody. Thanks.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

Tina Morris... just being a little pedantic. I heard you say over and over you have a balance budget and the organisation is healthy; however, you also said you withdrew money from reserves to cover expenses this year, that's not a balanced budget, I just want to be, that's what the reserves are for, that's fine. I am just hearing you keep saying it's a balanced budget, it's kind of bothering me.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: I am sure that was not what I tried to say, we added to our reserve this year and redistributed about 2.8 million euro to our members. So in that sense we do have ‑‑ well yeah, we have a balanced financial year.

SPEAKER: So you added to the budget ‑‑

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: 622,000 euro we added to our reserves.

SPEAKER: I completely misunderstood, thank you for clarifying.

SIMON‑JAN HAYTINK: You are welcome.

There seems to be no other questions, then I will move on to my second presentation. OK, something went wrong here. My apologies.

My last presentation for this General Meeting, a subject that generally sarks discussions, the RIPE NCC charging scheme. I kindly request you to hold your questions until after Raymond is done with his part of the presentation, so let's get into it.

Funding our association. The RIPE NCC is a membership association. Not a for profit association. The purpose of a membership association is to serve the best interests of the membership as a whole. The member fees support the association an its mission. The charging scheme is the mechanism we use to spread the burden of funding the association. The task at hand, in this GM, we decide how the cake should be split with the charging scheme vote, at the next General Meeting we decide on size of that cake, the activity plan and budget.

Some background. The development of the 2027 charging scheme proposals, we started in August 2024 with forming a member based charging scheme task force, a lot of healthy discussion within the task force, and end result has been the published report from that task force. Then internally we started to design the different models which have also been consulted with the task force, we published three draft models and finally we presented the two to be voted on by you at a General Meeting, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the task force for their time and effort they invested.

Some issues that were surfaced during this project. The work of the task force made already existing issues more visible, which allowed for a more transparent discussion, it also opened a broader conversation on resource holdings from legacy two PI and one LIR one fee model did not exsuppose as much. It also triggered member discussions around historical inconsistencies and perceived inconsistencies, many of the issues raised are policy questions. These items should not be solved via the charging scheme.

The principles that have been incorporated into the category model, differentiation in fees based on objective definer allocated resources. 21 categories. IPv6 is included but in such a way it does not financially disincentivise take up. The first /29 IPv6 per LIR account does not count towards the category calculation. The same applies for the first ASN and now we have separated IPv4 legacy charge from the PI charge. Principles and/or complexities that need further discussion as presented earlier in the RIPE NCC services... charging per member versus charging for LIR account, legacy charges, PI charges and resource transfers.

The overall direction of the charging scheme, the category model would allow for further evaluation as needed. Further refinement would be possible as complexities are better understood, it provides a more flexible basis for future adjustments like price adjustments per category, both models can accommodate additional fees with transfer fees being an example and with that, it allows opportunity to bring outcome outside of the member shit fees. The two options.

Option A: One LIR account, one fee. Continues the current model. It's based on members paying an annual fee per LIR account, this model would increase the fee per LIR from 1,800 to 1,894. It introduced a 75 euro fee per legacy, IPv4 resource registration based on a direct contract with the RIPE NCC. The first... would be included in the annual fee. Sign up fee of 1,000 euro remains.

Option B: The category model is based on members paying an annual fee per LIR account. 21 categories based on either IPv4 or IPv6 PA resources. All members pay a fee of at least 500 euro per LIR account. Within this fee a member can apply via the regular routes for a /29 IPv6 and that is without an increase in cost. Meaning a new LIR can immediately start with resources without an increase in their fee.

The new legacy fee and sign up fee will be exactly the same in both models and the timing of the invoices will remain the same.

A very quick overview of the 21 category option B which will just browse over as you can you can view that on your own time.

A few visuals for option B, 75% of the LIR accounts will be paying less if that option is selected. The graph on your left shows a spread of LIR accounts in a different categories, this is a good indicator of how members are spread over the categories which is of course based on PA holds, total PA holdings. As you see in this overview, we do not have any LIRs in category 20 or 21.

We have added these categories just in case so we can apply the higher category fee if and when an LIR would have that amount of resources.

The income associated with both models you can vote on, adds up to 42.5 million euro. Now, you will see some differences in both models I will explain.

In both models the total budget income for membership fees is 41 million, with an additional 1.5 million from other income. We use 20,000 LIR accounts for budgeting purposes.

Dividing thge 41 million by 20,000 LIR accounts gives the average income of 20,050 euro per LIR account. The one LIR one fee increase is 5.22% from 1,800 to 1,894. The total income increase is 3.3% based on Dutch inflation over 2025.

Comparing both models, the category fee will gin rate more from existing members, the reason I will come back to overall the one LIR one fee is simple and predictable, the number of LIR counts times the LIR fee, the category model is more equitable but does add some uncertainty. As the PI resource holdings will change over time, which creates that uncertainty.

This uncertainty is compensated by more possibilities to adopt. Contrary to the one LIR one fee in which we have one fee we can change, the category model provides 21 categories with individual fees and limits that can be tweaked.

For both models we have three separate fees which also provides opportunity for specific changes if so desired.

In this slide I show the calculations behind the separate fees. We see a reduction in ASN income as the first ASN will not be charged. Independent resource fees a slight deduction as the already existing legacy charge is moved to the new fee. The new legacy IPv4 for members is a new line in this overview.

And then income from new members, a significant reduction in the category fee as a new LIR account will not have any resources and, therefore, pay 500 euro plus the sign up fee of 1,000. I used 50% of this 500 fee in my calculation as average new members joined about halfway in the year

And lastly the reopening fees which in 2027 one LIR one fee model I reduced slightly to ensure the total adds up to that 42.5 million.

And with that, my part comes to an end and I will hand over to Raymond, the treasurer of our Executive Board.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Hello. Hi everyone. I am here to share with you the recommendation of the votes from the Executive Board, but to make sure that you vote on what you think is best.

It's an important vote of course.

As the Executive Board of the RIPE NCC we recommend voting for option B, the category model. This implements most of the principles set by the members based task force. It allows for remaining principles to be introduced gradually in the coming years. It would see fees reduced for about 75% of the LIR accounts.

By providing two options for the General Meeting to vote on, we have provided a clear choice for members, equality with option A, this means we will continue as we have done for over a decade. All members contributing the same fee per LIR account.

The equity with option B, a change in our approach with members making annual contribution linked into the amount of PA resources allocated to them.

Option B addresses what we have heard from members in a way that guarantees stability and allows for evolution where needed.

So the resolution:

Option A, the General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC charging scheme model A.

Option B, the General Meeting adopts RIPE NCC charging scheme model B.

To ensure there's absolutely clarity in the voting system, below you see the resolutions to vote on, there's a description and a link to each document.

Any questions about this?

Peter.

PETER HESSLER: I was the co‑chair of the charging scheme task force and I would like to ‑‑ in discussion with members and hearing other things, I have heard some unfortunate misstatements and untruths about the various models, so I wanted to quickly clarify some things I have heard.

One of the concerns is that members under categories that members could be treated differently depending on their size. And while that may be a concern and a reality in other RIR systems in ARIN, a different category means a different number of votes, it's not available in the RIPE region and certainly not being proposed. Athina can correct me if I get this wrong, but I believe one of our articles of association explicitly states one member one vote; and secondly I believe Dutch law requires us to have that, we are not allowed to change that. We are not allowed to show any sort of favouritism based on how much money a member pays as a member.

The other concern is losing ‑‑ the risk of losing the non‑profit status. We are, as a non‑profit, I believe, we are also allowed to charge a different fee to members and Athina can correct me if I am wrong.

ATHINA FRAGKOULI: I would, for the record, like to confirm on both of them, your statements.

PETER HESSLER: OK, thank you very much, I want to encourage the members to vote for things based on truthful statements and make sure that you vote for what you feel is best and what is best for you as a member and what's best for the organisation as ‑‑ that you are a member of.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

SPEAKER: First of all, I would like to say that the flat‑fee model really respects the principle that each member has only one vote, only one voice that is equal to the voices of other members. While the category model doesn't respect this principle.

Another thing I would like to address, by recommending members how they should vote, I really think the board is stepping outside of its proper role. This is inappropriate in my view. The board should have remained neutral or... in voting entirely. OK.

RAYMOND JETTEN: I would like to answer that.

We have had for many General Meetings different charging schemes, and we have had continuous input from the members that they wanted a different model than the flat model. We have tried to make them, we have tried to make several differences of them, they were all voted down. Still the feedback from the members say we want a different type of model where we have not a flat fee. Therefore we have taken the task force to provide us a model. So once we asked the task force to provide us a model, it would be strange to reject that and say that, look, we don't care what the task force said, we will, we take the flat model. So therefore we recommend that because the amount of work that has been done in the last year or year and a half is enormous. And to be really honest, we don't want to do this every year.

SPEAKER: The board decided to propose two options for voting, this means you are not sure which one is really reflects the ‑‑ what the members wanted to see but you propose two instead of one.

RAYMOND JETTEN: The members decide, the members have the vote, they can decide what they want.

SPEAKER: The Board doesn't need to recommend anything, you just propose it and we are good, thank you.

ATHINA FRAGKOULI: May I clarify something? Neither model, neither of the proposed models affect the voting rights, it's always one member, one vote. This doesn't change and we cannot change that because it's a requirement by the Dutch legislation. Thank you.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Can I also add a comment here because I hear that some people are calling for the Board to stay completely neutral and not voice an opinion on an important matter like this. And of course that is one point of opinion. However, in large corporations and in many government systems, it's quite natural and expected that the board signals clearly what the board thinks is best for the association. Think of a buy‑out of a large corporation, another company offers to take over, sometimes the board goes to the GM and says no, we do not recommend this take over option. So having a board actually stating their opinion based on their analysis in my opinion, that's what you elect your board members to do. Whether you want to listen to that advice or not, that's entirely up to you. And you as members are free to vote in what you believe is best for the association.

RAYMOND JETTEN: OK.

ONDREJ FILIP: If I can echo what Raymond just said, I think it's absolutely true we asked the volunteers from the membership to be part of the task force, many people join and they spent enormous 'amount of work on this, so just saying we are absolutely neutral to completely disqualify the valuable work of the task force and the task force supported this kind of model so that's why the board endorsed it. So that's why we did it.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Cynthia.

SPEAKER: Yeah, first of all I just want to say as one of the members on the task force, I think the board has done a great job in proposing two different models that both match the current one and what the task force recommended while keeping the differences as minimal as possible in order to prevent other factors from determining the outcome. So great job on that.

Secondly, I guess people might not think that the category based one is fair but might not think the flat fee is fair, something to consider is that as many people have raised an opinion on the various mailing lists are basically as many definitions of fair in this context. Everyone has a very different definition of fair. So saying B is not fair or A is not fair doesn't really mean anything objectively. Just because like everybody has a very different definition, so I guess just consider that.

OK.

RAYMOND JETTEN: I can't remember who was first, is it you or Remco?

SPEAKER: Hi to everybody, my name is Irene in a... I am speaking on behalf of Ukraine Internet Association. First of all, I wanted to thank RIPE community and RIPE Board team for listening to operators and for not supporting the proposal to increase the charges up to one thousand euro, you know, for Ukraine is not a case of money, first of all, it's a case of resilience. As you know, Ukranian internet networks built around the idea of decentralisation and this keeps us connected and helps us to resilient in this war time, difficult ‑‑ for us it's not just address resources but it gives small operators independence, so they can change upstream providers if infrastructure destroyed, damaged. So significant increase of PI cost could force many small operators to lose this independence and for us scheme A is the better solution for this time while war is continuing. So we think it keeps RIPE NCC financially stable and would put an unfair burden with decentralised internet infrastructure like Ukraine and also it gives community time to adapt without damaging resilience and competition for peaceful country this may be a question of financial discussion, for Ukraine during war time, it's a question of resilience and survival. So our experience shows decentralisation is not an efficiency, it's resilience. Thank you.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you for your statement.

REMCO VAN MOOK. Sure, Remco van Mook speaking as an individual former board member and chair of the previous charging scheme committee. Congratulations first ever all forgetting here and well exceedingly well done to the chair, to the current chairs committee for landing us to this point. I will be personally voting for option B, I will be following board recommendation. I also will say I don't think it matters much. And the reason why I am saying is that while having a new charging scheme will probably kick the ball forward for a couple of years where we could say well we just changed the charging scheme or just had a vote on, whatever, but it stays what it is, the structural issue on relying many of the discussions at the policy level at the General Meeting level with the fundamental problem underneath it is that we have a tiered system of resource holders and that tiered system is embedded in our policies, in our articles, in our everything and it has allowed companies resource holders to gain the system for decades.

And up to and until we actually finish the membership structure, so we stop having a tiered system of resource holders, none of this will matter in the long‑term.

So congratulations and well done on finding a new charging scheme, I hope you can now move on to fixing the structural issue.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thanks. Thanks for the charging scheme belongs completely to the task force, thank you.

BBRIAN NISBET: Brian Nisbet, so I stood at this microphone a couple of times in charging scheme discussions and talked about a lot of things, especially around the ENREN and educational piece where people to have large amounts of address space for various reasons and are not large commercial companies are obviously now in category B all rolled in together. There was a lot of discussion and there was indeed in some of the earlier versions of the charging scheme, there was discussion of an educational carve out for want of a better phrase or discount or whatever word, which did not make it in to the category B proposal. So I am wondering why that decision was made when you came to the final form of the charging scheme?

RAYMOND JETTEN: OK. I am going to give the mic to Peter.

PETER HESSLER: Speaking on behalf of the Charging Scheme Task Force, we definitely investigated that option and we are interested in having some sort of mechanism for educational networks. We found it very difficult to find a sensible third party who can define this properly, who would count as educational and who would not count as educational and the few entities we found completely failed once we started looking anywhere like doing any sort of deep investigation on it. It is something that we, that the charging scheme task force would like to see, but it was not possible for us to come up with a sensible way to define who qualifies at this time.

BRIAN NISBET: If I may, I think that is, so here's the thing, I am going to thank the charging scheme for the work and I am going to address my question towards the NCC and the Board who are the ones fundamentally publishing the charging scheme. So I understand obviously the task force did huge amounts of work, but ultimately it's presented by the board.

Now, look, in the grand schemes of things, hopefully this won't, you know, hopefully this will have a small impact or no impact at all, that would be lovely. But I think ‑‑ I am not, I don't really accept that answer I guess from the point of view of what could happen, I am not aware of myself or anyone else who is adomain expert in this area being consulted on that particular problem that was had so I think ultimately the board is the one who publish the charging scheme and are the onces who are asking the NCC. So yeah, as I said, if that's the answer, fair enough, but I think it's perhaps not the best piece of strategy in that or the best decision in there. Thank you.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

JOB SNIJDERS: Job Snijders speaking for Job Snijders, I want to start with some compliments, I think this time around the board did a good job of starting a task force and then that task force a phenomenal job I think representing the community and coming to a form of consensus and I am not sure if the task force even received a round of applause yet but...

(APPLAUSE.)

What I really, I want to express appreciation for the process we managed to execute because if I contrast this to the Rotterdam meeting with partially my fault because I was on the board back then but what was put forward was a more difficult choice because a lot of parameters were concurrently changed and it became less transparent what the consequences or purpose of the various choices were.

And this time around, starting bottom up by having recognised representatives of the community of diverse backgrounds come to a consensus put forward recommendations and then construct a model based on the recommendations rather than the gut feeling of the Executive Board. And then laying down the options in this clear manner, providing tooling to predict your cost, that was something that was missing the previous round. And in this round I felt the documentation was much, much better. So thank you for allowing the community to make an informed choice. I don't think the Board could do much better than they did.

And as for the choices, I personally really like option B because it allows the association to grow in and incorporate people, new ideas, because the barrier to entry will be lowered and what that brings is a degree of uncertainty. But I do think that the internet is something that grows and that means that our membership should grow with it, there needs to be a path for people to start small, in an affordable way obtain resources and start interacting with the technology. And I think we have a cooler path, a more exciting path than what was previously available with just PI resources. So I think option B is better for me. That's going to have my vote. And thank you.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

SPEAKER: I do thank the committee and the work that's gone in, it is a difficult discussion. In fact, it's been a difficult discussion for three decades because pretty much annually people have discussed pricing and they have decided that they either get value for money and, therefore, happy to pay it or don't think they are getting value for money and they want to somebody else to pay part of their fee, this is going going on for 30 years. I like to remind people we used to have a category system, it took a long time and a lot of discussions and a lot of meetings before that was discussed and got rid of and we went to a flat fee, some of us are grey enough to remember, some of us are not. If there is a perceived hierarchy of policy, if there is a perceived hierarchy of resources, a perceived hierarchy of membership, I do not believe we can fix that by adding in yet another hierarchy in charging. Don't take away the one equitable thing we do currently have, fix the things. I will be voting A.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

SPEAKER: I just like to disagree with something someone said earlier. I think it's perfectly correct and appropriate for the board to have a recommendation. The board, the members choose the board, presumably you are paying attention, I trust you to be paying attention and make good recommendations, that's all.

(Applause.)

ULKA ATHELE: We have three online questions, let me know if you would like to me to read all three, the first one... LIR operator says: Has RIPE NCC considered a hybrid option C model, with small regional adjustment co‑ efficients to better reflect economic differences between operators across the RIPE region while still keeping the overall fee structure simple and predictable?

Peter?

PETER HESSLER: That is actually something that the task force did discuss, again we ran into the problem of how do you define regions that should receive one set of fees versus another set of fees, how those fees should be equitiably defined. And unfortunately the model ‑‑ so for example APNIC does it in a region, this does a UN report that does not mention by jurisdiction within our service region.

SPEAKER: Correction, I think it mentioned one.

PETER HESSLER: OK. I don't ‑‑

SPEAKER: You may be right.

ULKA ATHELE: Dimitry asks why were the proposals for a mandatory payment scheme and payments strictly for the number of IPv4 resources completely ignored? The initiative group simply ignored any suggestions in the discussion. Is this the position of the RIPE NCC leadership? If so, it is a loss of the trust of the members. If not, then why hasn't anything been done in this direction and we choose only from two models?

RAYMOND JETTEN: You want to do that? No?

PETER HESSLER: Peter Hessler again. Once again, the task force did consider that and we rejected it, we included that in all of our reports, in our draft minutes and I believe in our final report, which is one reason why we encourage the members to read the documentation you were given.

RAYMOND JETTEN: All right.

(APPLAUSE.)

I'd like to add to the person who questioned this that claiming there has been done no work is a very, very, very bad statement.

ULKA ATHELE: Howard... asks has RIPE NCC published or performed a risk assessment for judging scheme to 27 option B that models the impact of high category LIRs refusing to pay the increased fees? In particular I am concerned that option B may introduce concentrated revenue risk, or relatively small number of high category LIRs would be responsible for a materially larger share of the budget. Even if a handful of those members are unable or unwilling to pay the consequences could be significant for the RIPE NCC budget and potentially for the stability of the association. This risk could arise for several different reasons, including ability to pay internal budgeting constraints, procurement rules, legal or regulatory restrictions, sanctions exposure, board approval requirements, or simply a decision to terminate or restructure membership, has RIPE NCC am assessed these scenarios including stress tests for nonpayment or resignation aamong the largest fee categories?

RAYMOND JETTEN: OK, so the RIPE NCC has a model where the top group or what is it called ‑‑ pays around 40,000. If you look at the charging scheme of ARIN, you will be having a lot more. The thing that happened when the ARIN introduced this co‑charging scheme, there was only one written complaint, everybody paid the bill, there's been no problems so far.

SPEAKER: I could also just add on to that from the charging scheme task force that that was one of many reasons why linear type billing for IP addresses was not considered because in that case, we would have ended up with some members paying very, very large amounts and if they wanted to avoid having one member paying like a million euro.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Yes, we have done the risk analysis of this, a couple of years back we even had some simulations on various. And of course the theoretical risk is on the flat fee but it's difficult to model all kind of NMNA behaviours and what's happening in the market. If you look back on the slide in the slide deck presenting charging scheme option B you will see a distribution of a the fee and the number of LIRs in the different categories and 75% of the members will pay less than today. So I would say that it's highly likely that 75% of the members will definitely pay. So that would put 25% at maybe a higher risk than today, but if you look at the biggest category of a bit more than 30K, there is one member, the next category is two, the next one is seven and the next one is 14 and the one down to ‑‑ so on down to 20. So it's a limited number, while yes it may be a risk, expecting that all of this would not pay, I don't think that's very likely so we think this risk is manageable. And according to the service agreement and the policies, if the one biggest failed to pay they would, of course, deregister and we would reclaim their address space and that would have a much bigger consequence for that ISP than we ‑‑ than it would be for 30, so I think this is manageable; higher risk, yes, but marginally.

SPEAKER: So I also just want to reiterate what was already said, just... one of the reasons why we might not have suggested initially going for education discounts or having other well things to be recommended was that it would be easiest if it was more of a simple I guess change, not changing everything at once because in Rotterdam, a bit too many things were ... and we also had, I think, two different alternative models so they both got a bit split. So it got quite complicated. So while things like education discount might be relevant, I think that's something that can be looked into maybe next year if model B passes. Because we don't ‑‑ changing too many things at once is going to cause complications. And also there are questions about maybe should non‑profits also get discounts, should ENRENs get discounts or universities, should, yeah I can like there's endless questions, so it's best to keep is simple for now and then fix things and adjust them as needed in future. Thank you.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Was it you or...

SPEAKER: ... I really like Job's perspective and idea that option about will grow the membership especially with newcomers to the community personally I am a big fan of that, I think we also have to talk about like 32‑bit shaped elephant in the room, it will remain difficult to fully participate in the internet if you stay in one of those smaller categories. And if you look at V4 space, being a fan of the growth of the community though I would like to reiterate that we all have a responsibility to not make that a problem any more, which means V6 migration.

Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

LARS LIMAN: So Lars Liman from NetNode. I don't really like the tiered model because that gives me a notion of different value for different members, I do hear the voting power will stay the same way for members but it gives a different notion. I believe that when you are a member of an association, you should be treated equally which means you should pay the equal amount in a membership fee. The tiered model looks more to me like a tax system where a majority of voters who have the voting power decide that someone that has more money should pay more.

That doesn't really work well in my mind with an association; it might work for a tax system. I also think that the operating in this industry comes with a cost, one of the costs is to, you know, be associated with an LIR, and in our case it's the RIPE NCC.

If we really think that it's important to get new and up coming companies in and give them some Lee way getting into the system, I would argue instead of lowering the entrance fee and give them a discount for the first one or two years so they have a chance to get on board, that's a totally different thing that's not on the table today, but I do like the one and the same fee for all. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

SPEAKER: ... speaking on behalf of my own company and network. I'd like to clarify a difference between equality and equity in the English language. I won't elaborate it too much, look it up, there's a nice little gift of three people standing on boxes where like there's a tall guy, a short guy and a medium guy, and they all get a box, there's three boxes, you can distribute between the group, right, and in the equity, the short guy gets all three boxes, so he can actually see what's going on. If you Google that, or search that, you will see what I'm talking about.

My second point is in terms of option B, every member participating in this meeting received a mail from the RIPE NCC with an estimation of what they would pay under option B before this meeting. Did any of the members especially any of the members that would be like a category 16 or larger that would see a significant increase in fees, did any of them lodge any formal complaints as a response to that mail?

RAYMOND JETTEN: Not that I have heard of, by the way I am category 15.

SPEAKER: Right.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: I think I can elaborate, I think it triggered members to come and vote, we have more than 3,000 votes registered, an amazingly high number and they have more people here that have told me they didn't plan to come. So... yes, it hasn't resulted in a formal complaint but it's resulted in people coming to use their democratic right.

SPEAKER: Like you said when ARIN introduce the model, they only registered one formal complaint, they had this scheme with another zero behind it, thanks.

RAYMOND JETTEN: I think it was you I am not sure.

TOM STRICKX: Cloudflare. I am going to hammer on the nail Blake so succinctly put down. In my opinion, and I believe that the largest resource holders should be paying the largest amount because at the end of the day, for the entire community, the resources that the RIPE NCC makes available to us as members are what drives our economic activity. As a result, the larger resource holders are likely to have high economic activity, like or at least somewhat correlated, at that point I think it's only just to make sure that the largest resource holders pay the largest costs. I think the easy way they may have avoided some of this discussion, could have been that this was not a membership fee conversation but a resource fee conversation. Because at the end of the day, I believe that that that's what we are paying for, I think that's the right thing to be paying for. This is not about the difference between, oh, I am a member of the RIPE NCC and I am paying a thousand euro and somebody else is a member of the RIPE NCC and is paying 15,000 euro and they feel unjustly put down because they feel that it's an unfair situation where other people have paid significantly less or significantly more, they get the same voting rights. At the end of the day, this is not purely about the membership, it's about the resources that you get assigned by the RIPE NCC.

As a result attaching voting rights to the money that you pay for the membership or the money that you pay for the resources that you get would be absolute insanity and we might as well go back to the 1700s at that point, let's not. As a result I would highly advocate that people vote for option B and it is the only right thing to do. It is the only right thing to do to ensure growth for the RIPE community, the only right thing to do to make sure that we can last as a community and make sure that we keep building the internet and making sure people are younger or less advantaged have the availability or the access to make sure that they can work on the internet, work in the internet and learn from there. So I appreciate that, thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE.)

ROB GOLDING: Rob Golding again, on this 75% number thrown around a lot, are the board looking to write that into the articles to carve is in stone an nail it down because at the moment it appears to be largely guesswork based on working through the current numbers and yet we are not setting the budgets or discussing that and presumably you are not finding out the per item costs until the next meeting so we don't really know the 75% is going to be 75%.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Could you clarify?

SPEAKER: You keep saying 75% of people will pay less.

HANS PETTER HOLEN: Comparing these two models that you you are now voting on, 75% of the members will pay less in model B. That's certain. It's got not nothing to do with the by‑laws or nothing to do with whatever budget accounts for next year, this is about the income, and in both models, they give the RIPE NCC the same income. So the budget, the spending that's a matter for the board to approve, the income is a matter for the General Meeting to approve. The board can approve spending more or less than the income. That's something they decide in their December meeting.

SPEAKER: OK, thank you.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Tina. Hi, yes, so as somebody that's, I am all for category B for the record. I am all for 75% of your members paying less money. I love the concept you brought up of paying for resources, not membership, because voting rights should be one vote per member, period, no more power.

75% of the Orgs don't use very many resources from RIPE on a daily basis, they are passive. They are not coming and talking to your services desk all the time because they don't have a ton of space.

My team talks to RIPE a lot. We use way more than the 2,000 euro a year on average in services and it should be more proportional, if I ‑‑ if I held the same resources in another region I would pay more for them than this charging scheme is paying. And the perception that paying more will get you special treatment, I am currently a platinum sponsor, I guarantee I get no special treatment!

(APPLAUSE.)

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you. Tobias

SPEAKER: Speaking for myself, I wanted to share an observation with the room. I see a lot of people going to the mic that work for organisations that use the resources they get from RIPE to offer services and then monetise on these services, and they end up in really high categories. And I see most of these people actually speaking for category B, model B, the category model. I think I had a flier fly by me which was very vocal about category A and that seemed to be more from an organisation more focused on monetising the IP addresses and the services... this is just an observation.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

SPEAKER: Warren Kumari. I guess I will kind of agree with Lars Lehman but this does some way feel like a tax but that seems perfectly fine to me, people who are using the service a bunch and are making money because they happen to have IP dress addresses and use them on the internet, it doesn't seem unreasonable for them to pay more. Somebody else also noted that potentially large organisations will move their resources away if there's additional cost, I don't view that as really a risk, right. The additional cost for somebody who falls into a 15 or 16 is so small generally, I don't think that's an issue, I think category B makes much more sense.

RAYMOND JETTEN: Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.) Ulka?

ULKA ATHELE: Marcus Miliker sonnet asks why not start a task force to check the possibility to charge by fair share policy for tickets database usage etc. So propose in the next RIPE General Assembly the change, one fee for all but charge by the company burden to manage them?

SPEAKER: I can say why the charge charging scheme task force did not recommend that, we did want to charge for members in war zones higher fees because of course sanctions checking for Ukranian members and other due process, I guess processes cost a heck of a lot more money for Ukrainians but charging them more would be very unfair. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

RAYMOND JETTEN: It would be an enormous overhead of work for the financial team to figure

Out who he has to pay what.

ULKA ATHELE: Dimitry asks what is the purpose of the NCC, to collect a budget or manage resources? How will scheme A or B improve the situation with access to management resources for members other than reducing the price for 75% of them?

RAYMOND JETTEN: The RIPE NCC does much more than that. And that's all that information is available on www.Ripe.net, please have a look at it.

No more questions? OK. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)

ONDREJ FILIP: OK, so now the next agenda item is the Executive Board board elections, I will not do anything but just ask the technical staff to show the videos of five confirmed candidates. Thank you.

(Videos played, subtitled)

(APPLAUSE.) Fill please acknowledge those brave people.

Trust me, it's not easy to stand in front of you and present some programme, trust me I went through it three times so it's not easy so thank you very much for your volunteering all of you and thank you all three members whose term ends because they made a great job so thank you for that.

(APPLAUSE.) With that I will ask Karla to come to the stage and explain the voting procedure and how the platform works.

KARLA WHITE: OK. So last presentation of the day. Let's go through how to vote at this GM and I know a lot of people are looking forward to that part. The first part is it is electronic voting only at this GM, no paper ballots. I am sorry.

Next in line. Voting analysis, we have got 3,421 votes registered at this GM, we very nearly beat May 2020 but just didn't quite get there.

But I just, I don't know what you are all registering to vote for!

So voting on the resolutions. So we have got three resolutions to vote on.

Now on 1 and 2 require more than 50% of the votes, but on that resolution 3 for the charging scheme vote, the options require more than 50% of the votes to be approved.

Abstentions are noted but they do not count.

So, the board election, let's have a look, there are five candidates as you just saw but three seats, we are going to use instant run‑off voting for this one. You must choose at least one candidate for it to count. Or you can abstain from the vote. Then you just number them in order of preference, you don't need to number every candidate if you don't wish to and again the abstentions are noted but they don't count.

So instant run off voting, what is it, we have a video on the website you can go and have a watch over and over if you want to.

So you can rank the candidates in order of preference from first choice to second and then if a candidate gets more than 50% of the first choice votes, they are elected in the first seat. And then if no one gets 50%, the candidate with the fewest votes eliminated and then those votes from the eliminated candidate are reassigned. The video is much more clearer than how I am explaining it.

And then this process just repeats until one candidate has a majority.

And then how to vote.

I know I have had a lot of AGM inbox emails about this, hopefully this will clear that up for you.

You will get two emails in your inbox. The first one will look like this. It's very simple, click vote now.

The other one will have your voting code, this is also your GM registration number, you just take that number up there and you put it in here. So you put it just in that behind me here, this second box there so just put that short number in there. And log in.

This will take you through the resolutions, so for resolutions 1 and 2, you choose yes, you choose no or you choose abstain, and then you have to confirm your selection.

Assign your votes, if you have got more than one vote, if ‑‑ I know a lot of you do, you can use the little arrows on there and keep assigning your votes and confirm and cast.

You will then have ‑‑ see what votes you have got left over, add new ballot, go again and again, some people have quite a few votes, keep adding until you use up all your votes and click continue, you will get this nice green bar that says you have assigned all your votes, click continue, just have a little check if you have done anything wrong, you can click the little bins there and then go again if you really want to.

And then for resolution 3, you have got the model A, model B and you have got abstain. Choose which one you'd like and click confirm selection.

And then you have got the board, click the candidate names in the order you would like them, the little boxes will fill with the numbers, and again confirm your selection and of course you can also abstain if you wish to.

So you have got several votes, assign them again using the little arrows and click confirm and cast.

Submit the votes for the resolutions and the Executive Board elections, have a quick check, you can scroll through them all and finally click submit vote.

Now, this screen will appear, you can either scan the QR code or click the link and then this will take you to track your ballot page which looks like this. An this will show you anything that's happened on your ballots, any of the history, so you should recognise what you have just done on the screen there.

Now, trouble shooting. We are here to answer your questions but I thought this slide would be quite useful, check your spam folder please, I know some people don't always get the second email so have a look in there, if you are using as far re, that voting code one might not appear, you might have to do a copy and paste and your email server does need to be TLS 1.2 compliant, please, and there is a tracking pixel, but assembly voting are just using it to send that reminder email for people who haven't voted. But I am not sure there's going to be many of those this time.

Please don't leave it too late. You do have until Friday morning to vote at nine o'clock UTC plus one, we can't do anything about it, once it's closed, it's closed, there's no button to reopen it, so please vote in time. As said, we are here, we are at the end of the email there, agm@ripe.net and we'll be on the registration desk from nine to five tomorrow.

And voting can take place once Ondrej announces it very shortly; you can cast your vote until 9 o'clock in the morning on Friday, UTC plus one, Edinburgh time and Ondrej will announce the results at half past ten. You can watch the results, you had an email from Meetecho that had the live streak link in it, you can watch it again there at half past 10 on Friday and find out the results and we'll be announcing them in this room.

Any questions and comments? Oh we have one. Hello.

SPEAKER: Just speaking for myself, this was the clearest explanation of rank choice voting I have seen in years that we have been doing this.

(APPLAUSE.)

Just to repeat as I always do, a rank choice vote is still a vote, this is not like 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever, if you don't want to see a candidate on the board, don't tick the box, that's all. Thank you.

KARLA WHITE: Thank you.

And with that, I will hand you over to Ondrej.

(APPLAUSE.)

ONDREJ FILIP: Thank you very much Karla.

So with that I can move to the last point that we have on the agenda today, that's voting and the resolution. Let me read the resolution.

Resolution number one: The general meeting discharges the Executive Board with regards to its action as they appear from the annual report 2025 and financial report 2025.

Resolution number 2: The General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC financial report 2025.

Resolution number 3: Option A, the General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC charging scheme model A.

And option B, the General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC charging scheme model B. Surprisingly.

And then we have five candidates, five great brave people who put their names forward and these are Maria Hall, Raymond Jetten, Danko Jevtovic, Lars Johann Lehman and Harald Summa, so you have your choice and when I said I like to the presentation about the executive board discharge that that's my favourite presentation, this is my favourite moment because I feel very powerful because I can say, the voting is open, and it opens. Thank you very much.

I think that's the last item for today. See you tomorrow at 10.30 local time and I will ‑‑ sorry, I said 10.30. Again, we will reconvene on Friday, 22nd May at 10.30 local time, UTC plus one. And I will let you know what are the results of your voting. Thank you very much. Thank you for participating.

(APPLAUSE.)

So the meeting is adjourned.

GM Results

22 May, 2026

ONDREJ FILIP: Good morning, please don't leave the room if you want to see how the General Meeting ended up

So, I have a voting report from the General Meeting and I am sure you are all interested in the results so let's jump directly into them.

First of all the first resolution was the discharge of the Executive Board and it was approved by super majority, 91%, so approved easily. So the Executive Board is discharged with regard to its action as they appear annual report to 25 an financial report 2025.

Resolution number two. The General Meeting adopts the RIPE NCC financial report 2025. Again clear majority. 94%. The resolution was approved.

And now I guess you are all interested...

If we will revoke the resolution that was passed almost 14 years ago in September 2012.

And the answer is, no. The option A won by 51%. The difference in the votes is just 68, which is incredible.

It's a good lesson actually, I learned a lot this week, and I understand the community is really split and we can see it's roughly half and half, so not easy to continue the discussion, but the option A was voted and it will stay.

Last but not least the Executive Board elections, and we had five candidates for three seats and you can see pictures of the winners on the screen. Raymond Jetten, Maria Hall and Lars Johann Lehman.

(APPLAUSE.)

So. And let me thank the candidates and namely Harald for his service for RIPE NCC, thank you very much Harald.

(APPLAUSE.)

Very last thank yous, thanks to John Sweeting from ARIN, the independent observer of the General Meeting and the voting results process, thank you very much. And if you are interested ‑‑ and I am sure many of you are about the details of the voting ‑‑ please read the full voting report which is going to be published soon, or it's published already.

Any questions and comments, I am sure there will be a lot of comments later, right? Anyway, the meeting is concluded. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE.)