The internet may feel borderless—until someone tries to trade an IP address across countries. IP addresses function like digital real estate, available to buy, sell or lease. Yet the regulatory systems governing them still resemble a 1990s post office—slow, bureaucratic and outdated.
Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)—which were established in the early 1990s as address stewards, not owners—were never designed to manage today’s high-value IP addresses. To date, IP address ownership is ambiguous and largely untested in courts. RIRs insist that holders are not owners, but only lease usage rights, which can be reversed if policies change.
As markets and technology become more complex, RIR policies need to change—and fast—or risk slowing down internet growth and innovation. This isn’t an obscure tech company problem anymore; it impacts everyone using the internet.
Legacy RIR policies increase internet costs in underserved geopolitical areas. A small or new Southeast Asian or African startup could find it much harder or more expensive to get an IP address than a larger, more established company. These higher costs are then passed on to consumers, slowing rural connectivity and discouraging other tech startups and local jobs.
Fewer local and clean IPs force internet providers to use workarounds like tunnelling and NAT, causing dropped video calls, slower websites and unreliable services, while mismanaged or hoarded address blocks lead to users getting flagged or blocked.
IP address transfers and markets are no longer taboo—so why do many of their regulatory conditions still feel like holdovers from a different era?
Needs tests are one such relic, originally used to justify a need for IPv4 address space and ensure that addresses are actually used and not speculated on or hoarded. While this may have made sense when IPv4 scarcity was only a distant prospect, in today’s highly dynamic market, they’re an efficiency bottleneck. RIPE has done away with needs tests, but registries like APNIC, ARIN and LACNIC still enforce them.
Another roadblock is regional usage requirements. Different transfer conditions, documentation needs and approval procedures all slow IP address transfers. Add in long wait times, and some organizations could wait months or even years.
It’s time RIR policies acknowledged the obvious: IPv4 addresses are tradeable commodities now.
Policies around leasing, transfers and cross-border use need updating, without compromising interoperability. Governance must also catch up, becoming faster, more inclusive and able to balance technical stability with today’s market realities. At the same time, leaders need to steer clear of over-commercialization, which can cause fragmentation and threaten interoperability.
Tech leaders can accelerate this shift by building coalitions that advocate for standardized, cross-regional IP transfer procedures to reduce delays and compliance friction. They should pilot IP leasing initiatives in emerging markets, using data from these projects to shape scalable global frameworks.
Partnering with regulators and ISPs to create shared best-practice models can also align regional compliance and improve transparency. Finally, introducing policy sandboxes—controlled environments for testing new RIR rules—would allow innovation without risking systemic stability.
This is the time for a more agile and iterative policy-making approach, supporting experimentation and adaptation. More diverse voices and stakeholders, especially commercial ones, should be welcomed, too.
While community-led governance models are helpful, scalability and ethical concerns remain. RIRs have to focus more on integrating emerging technologies, like edge computing, while enhancing stability and security.
One of the biggest blockers of RIR evolution currently is slow policy change. Decisions are usually taken by leaders from niche technical communities, making it more challenging for newcomers, especially commercial ones, to have a seat at the table. Significant bureaucracy can bury new ideas, with current policies strengthening the status quo, while deterring competition and complicating new technology adoption.
By including more commercial stakeholders in key policy decisions and prioritizing transparency, RIRs can actually align with current markets, especially if more referendum-like or democratic systems are implemented. This will ensure policies stay flexible and relevant, evolving with internet usage itself, instead of getting stuck in legacy hurdles.
Vincentas Grinius is a co-founder at IPXO, an all-in-one automated IP address platform offering secure, compliant, and flexible solutions to drive internet sustainability and help businesses scale. Vincentas has a long track record and 10+ years of experience combining today’s technologies and making Heficed the first in the market IPv4 lease and monetization platform. The platform brings RIRs, LIRs, and from small to large enterprises together to share the IPv4 resources and to make the Internet much more sustainable.
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Yes, the problem is the slow development of policy, but that reveals a larger problem. Internet governance is the province of a few, likely less than a hundred people globally , who dominate their various RIRs. I am all for stakeholder governance, but this crop of rulemakers (same as the last crop) are largely technocratic busybodies unused to power or its correct application. These are not politicians with a finger in the air, not personalities well-suited to represent the interests of the average man-on-the-street Internet user. This is a small, rigid, and entrenched group of people who travel to biannual meetings on others’ money, and form a small but impenetrable clique whose gatekeeping function keeps newcomers cowed and recalcitrant, instead of excited and forward-looking. They came of age when the RIRs calcified and their rules reflect this, with a continuation of policies long past their due-dates. These are stewards who think themselves kings, and their policy choices reflect that. This bottom-up form of government is best, but this tiny group puts the whole concept at risk, so consider this a paean to participation. Everybody reading this can participate and I invite you to do so.