April 9, 2021

A Glimpse At The History of Regional Internet Registries

The internet started as an experimental project that connected some research institutions. Right from the beginning, all the devices that are connected to the internet required an IP address, which is a unique number that identifies the particular device and thereby helps it to be located on the network. For the setup to work without any issues, all the connected devices should have a unique address. Therefore, it was important for the allocation of the IP addresses to be registered carefully.

During its inception, the global IP address registry was merely a list, list of IP address ranges alongside the details of the organizations which were allocated with IP addresses. As the years went by, this list began to expand; all thanks to the innumerable organizations that joined the internet trend. With the growth in the list, the role of keeping a record of the IP addresses was formalized as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

The list of organizations joining the internet continued to grow and due to the rapid expansion of the internet across the world, it became difficult for IANA to meet the demand for IP addresses and in 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force recommended the management of internet number resources at a regional level by subsidiary organizations.

The Regional Internet Registries was established due to this and they assumed the management and local allotment of IP addresses in cooperation with IANA. These registries keep track of agencies that sell IPv4 address spaces and lease IP addresses in addition to many other things. There are five regional internet registries across the globe and they are ARIN, LACNIC, APNIC, AFRINIC, and RIPE NCC. The Regional Internet Registries will have authority within their respective regions to register Autonomous System numbers and IP address space.

The Regional Internet Registries operate as self-regulatory bodies and the open structures of these bodies encourage direct participation of the parties via a bottom-up decision-making process that is consensus-driven. These are not-for-profit organizations that are self-funded by the members and all those who make use of the resources. For many years, this setup has offered a resources management system that is stable, scalable, and effective, in addition to being fair and open. This has played a critical role in the growth of the internet and can ensure the stability of the internet in the future.

RIRs work single-handedly in their respective regions of service. Some of this is established via the Number Resources Organization that unites the RIRs.