Letter from Oleksandr Savchuk, Chairman of the Board, Ukrainian Internet Association (PDF)
Response from the Executive Board Chair, RIPE NCC (PDF)
Amsterdam, 23 December 2022
Dear Mr Savchuk,
Thank you for your letter dated 20 October 2022. We would like to again express our solidarity with Ukrainian network operators at such a difficult time and reiterate that we will do what we can to support our members. We also hope you will be appreciative of the fact that we needed time to properly consider the feedback we received at RIPE 85 and analyse the options available to us before we could provide you with a substantive response.
This week, the RIPE NCC Managing Director outlined a course of action [1] that we think does much to address the concerns that yourself and others have raised, namely that members may be forced to transfer their IP resources while under occupation.
In short, the RIPE NCC will provide a means for members to lock their resources, which will prevent any subsequent transfer requests from being processed. This locking mechanism will be provided to all members on an opt-in basis. RIPE NCC staff will apply the highest levels of due diligence when reviewing requests and will require all supporting documents to be notarised, to further minimise the risk of fraudulent requests. In keeping with our mission of supporting stable Internet operations, we believe that safeguarding member resources should be our priority.
The RIPE NCC can implement this locking mechanism in relatively short order, based on an Executive Board resolution. However, this will require a policy proposal [2] from the RIPE community if it is to remain an option over the longer term. We welcome the participation of the Ukrainian community in this discussion to ensure the resulting policy addresses its concerns.
In connection with this, we note that you ask that the Russian community be excluded from this process. This is something we cannot do. As secretariat to the RIPE community, the RIPE NCC does not have the authority to exclude people from its policy discussions.
The RIPE community makes its decisions on the basis of rough consensus rather than voting. Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated. A key principle of RIPE is that people participate as individuals rather than as representatives of specific companies or nations. Anyone is free to share their thoughts on a proposal and arguments that lack merit are quickly discarded so the discussion can move forwards. The RIPE community has over thirty years of experience with this and it is unlikely that attempts to disrupt this process would be very successful.
We hope that what we have outlined above will help to alleviate some of your concerns on this matter. We recognise the importance it has for Ukrainian network operators and will continue to make this our highest priority.
Sincerely,
Ondřej Filip
Chair
RIPE NCC Executive Board
[1] Update on Measures to Protect Ukrainian Networks:
https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-announce/2022-December/001611.html
[2] RIPE Policy Development Process:
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-781