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Every device on the Internet needs an address. Every address has to be unique. And someone has to keep track of which addresses belong to whom.
For the first two decades of the Internet, the answer to "who does that?" was: one guy, with a notebook, at a university in Los Angeles.
His name was Jon Postel, and the story of how his notebook became five organizations governing the address space of the entire Internet is one of the strangest governance stories in technology.
One Man and a Notebook
In 1969, the ARPANET—the Internet's predecessor—had four nodes. Four. Keeping track of which network numbers belonged to which machines was not exactly a logistical challenge. Jon Postel, a graduate student at UCLA, started tracking assignments on scraps of paper1.
As the network grew from four nodes to dozens to hundreds, Postel kept doing the job. Not because anyone formally appointed him, but because someone had to, and he was already doing it. He published updates through "Assigned Numbers" RFCs—Request for Comments documents that served as the Internet's informal standards. RFC 790 in 1981. RFC 1700 in 19942. The title "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority"—IANA—was retroactively applied to the role Postel had been performing all along.
Think about that. The system that determined which addresses existed on the global Internet was, for years, a function of one researcher's diligence. No board of directors. No international treaty. Just Jon Postel, doing the work.
Why One Notebook Couldn't Scale
The Internet in 1969 was an American research project. The Internet in 1992 was becoming a global network. And the difference between those two things demanded a fundamentally different approach to governance.
Three problems made centralized allocation impossible:
The language and customs problem. A network operator in Tokyo and a network operator in Lagos have different languages, different business practices, different legal frameworks. A single registry in Virginia couldn't serve both effectively3.
The time zone problem. When it's business hours in Amsterdam, it's the middle of the night in Auckland. Address allocation isn't something that can wait for a single office to open.
The trust problem. No single nation should control the address space of the global Internet. Countries that didn't trust each other politically still needed to trust the numbering system. Regional governance distributed that trust.
In October 1992, the IETF published RFC 1366, which laid out the case for regional registries—organizations of "continental dimensions" that would manage address allocation within their geographic areas4. The document was practical, not visionary. But it established the architecture that governs the Internet's address space to this day.
The Five Registries
Five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) now manage the world's IP addresses and Autonomous System (AS) numbers. They emerged over thirteen years, each born from the specific needs of its region:
RIPE NCC — 1992
The Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre, based in Amsterdam, was the first RIR. It serves Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia—from Iceland to Oman to Kazakhstan5. RIPE NCC operates on a membership model where organizations become Local Internet Registries (LIRs) to receive address allocations directly.
APNIC — 1993
The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, based in Brisbane, Australia, serves the most populous region on Earth—East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania5. APNIC works with National Internet Registries (NIRs) in countries like China, Japan, South Korea, and India, adding an extra layer to the hierarchy.
ARIN — 1997
The American Registry for Internet Numbers, based in Chantilly, Virginia, serves the United States, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean5. ARIN was carved out of what had been a function of the U.S. government's Network Solutions contract—the last of the original three registries to become independent.
LACNIC — 2001
The Latin American and Caribbean Network Information Centre, based in Montevideo, Uruguay, serves Latin America and parts of the Caribbean not covered by ARIN5. Before LACNIC's creation, the region was served by ARIN—an arrangement that didn't sit well with a continent that wanted control over its own addressing.
AFRINIC — 2005
The African Network Information Resource Centre, based in Ebene, Mauritius, was the last RIR established5. Africa's Internet adoption was later than other regions, and the formation of its own registry marked a milestone in the continent's digital sovereignty. Before AFRINIC, African address allocations were handled by RIPE NCC, ARIN, and APNIC.
The Hierarchy: How Addresses Actually Flow
The allocation system works like a supply chain:
IANA—now operated by ICANN rather than one man with a notebook—maintains the global pool of unallocated addresses and distributes blocks to the five RIRs according to global policies6. Each RIR then follows its own community-developed policies to allocate addresses to ISPs and organizations within its region. Those organizations, in turn, assign addresses to their customers.
The IP address your device is using right now traveled through this chain. It was part of IANA's pool, then allocated to an RIR, then distributed to your ISP, then assigned to your connection. Every address has this lineage.
The Day the Addresses Ran Out
IPv4 provides roughly 4.3 billion addresses. That seemed like an unimaginable number in the 1980s. It wasn't.
On January 31, 2011, IANA allocated its last two available /8 blocks to APNIC. This triggered a global policy, ratified by ICANN in 2009, that distributed the final five /8 blocks—one to each RIR—in a ceremony held in Miami on February 3, 20117. Each RIR received approximately 16.8 million addresses. Then IANA's free pool was empty.
The RIRs' own pools drained at different rates, reflecting the Internet's uneven growth across regions:
- APNIC (Asia-Pacific): April 15, 2011—just ten weeks after the IANA ceremony8
- LACNIC (Latin America): June 10, 2014
- ARIN (North America): September 24, 2015
- RIPE NCC (Europe/Middle East): November 25, 2019
- AFRINIC (Africa): April 21, 2017
That APNIC exhausted its supply first surprised no one. Asia's Internet growth was explosive. That AFRINIC ran out before RIPE NCC—despite having far less Internet infrastructure—reflected Africa's later start and smaller initial allocation.
Today, all five RIRs operate under exhaustion policies. New IPv4 addresses are scarce. Organizations buy and sell address blocks on secondary markets. The real solution—IPv6, with its 340 undecillion addresses—continues its long, slow adoption.
As of the end of 2024, the global total stands at approximately 3.69 billion allocated IPv4 addresses across roughly 253,000 distinct allocation records9. The math is stark: 3.69 billion addresses for 8 billion people. Less than half an address per human.
Democracy at Internet Scale
The most unusual thing about the RIR system isn't what it does—it's how it decides what to do.
Each RIR develops its policies through a bottom-up, consensus-driven process that is open to anyone. Not just members. Not just ISPs. Anyone. A student in Nairobi can propose a policy change to AFRINIC. A small business owner in São Paulo can comment on LACNIC's allocation rules. Each RIR holds public meetings twice a year and maintains mailing lists where all policy discussions are archived and open10.
This is not how most governance works. Governments legislate top-down. Corporations decide by executive authority. The RIR system asks its community: "What should the rules be?" And then it builds consensus.
The process is slow. Deliberately. A policy proposal might take a year or more to move from idea to implementation. But the result is that the rules governing how Internet addresses are distributed in your region were shaped by the people those rules affect.
It's imperfect. The people who participate tend to be large ISPs and technically sophisticated organizations—not exactly a representative cross-section of Internet users. But as governance experiments go, it's remarkably democratic for something most people have never heard of.
When Governance Breaks Down
The RIR system's resilience was tested by the AFRINIC crisis, which began in 2020 and continued for years.
AFRINIC identified that Cloud Innovation Ltd, a Hong Kong-based company, had obtained African IP addresses and was using them outside the continent—a violation of AFRINIC's policies. When AFRINIC moved to revoke those resources, Cloud Innovation sued. And then everything unraveled11.
Mauritius courts froze $50 million in AFRINIC's bank accounts. The organization's board was declared invalid by the Supreme Court. The CEO's contract expired and couldn't be renewed because there was no board to renew it. By late 2022, AFRINIC—the registry responsible for Africa's entire Internet address space—had no functioning leadership. Staff continued basic operations, but the organization came close to being unable to pay them12.
In September 2023, the Supreme Court of Mauritius placed AFRINIC in receivership11. A receiver was appointed with instructions to maintain operations and conduct a board election.
The crisis exposed a vulnerability in the RIR model: these organizations manage critical Internet infrastructure, but they're subject to the legal systems of the countries where they're incorporated. AFRINIC is a nonprofit in Mauritius. Its ability to govern Africa's address space depends on Mauritian courts allowing it to function. When those courts intervened, the entire system trembled.
The Shadow of One Man
Jon Postel managed IANA from its informal inception until his death on October 16, 1998. He was 55. He died of complications from heart surgery—a leaking heart valve replacement13.
The timing was extraordinary. ICANN—the organization designed to formally assume the IANA responsibilities that Postel had carried personally—was officially created in early October 1998. Two weeks before Postel died13. He spent his final months helping design the institution that would carry on his work, then didn't live to see it operate.
The RIR system that exists today is, in a sense, the answer to a question Postel's life posed: What happens when something this important depends on one person? The Internet's address space is too critical, too global, and too valuable to rest on any single point of failure—whether that point is a person, an organization, or a nation.
Five registries. Five regions. Community-driven policies. Distributed trust. It's more complicated than one man with a notebook. But that's the point.
What the RIR System Means for You
You interact with the RIR system every time you connect to the Internet, even though you never see it. Your ISP holds address allocations from your regional RIR. The addresses your devices use have a provenance—a chain of custody—that stretches back through this hierarchy.
When you look up an IP address using a WHOIS query, you're reading the registration records maintained by the RIRs. When your company requests its own address space, it applies to the RIR for your region. When policy debates happen about how addresses should be allocated, transferred, or reclaimed—those debates are open to you.
The Internet feels like it just exists. Like addresses are just there, the way phone numbers are just there. But behind the seeming permanence is a system built by humans, maintained by organizations, and governed by a process that—for all its flaws—is more open and democratic than most people realize.
It started with a notebook. It became a global governance experiment. And every address on the Internet carries that history with it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Regional Internet Registries
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