* Radu-Adrian FEURDEAN > As you may know, the "multiple LIRs" is for the moment least expensive > way of getting around the "one /22" restriction. Combined withe the > removal of "need checking", this very much looks like selling /22 to > anybody willing to pay a sign-up and at least one year of membership.
I've attempted to explain to you before[1] why this line of reasoning makes no sense, but I'll try again in case you missed it the first time around. The RIPE NCC has always been automatically handing out minimum-sized initial IPv4 allocations to new members. This you can see already in ripe-136, which dates all the way back from 1996: «The first allocation will be made automatically by the RIPE NCC, generally upon receipt of the first assignment request from the local IR. Because there is no information about the rate at which a new IR will make address assignments, the size of the first allocation is always a /19 (8092 addresses).» "Need checking" was only used whenever the new LIR requested an initial allocation *larger* than the minimum allocation size, something the policy was later updated to allow for. (Figuring out exactly when that happened is an exercise left for the reader.) When the «last /8» policy was implemented, the possibility to request larger-than-minimal initial allocations was removed, so the procedure for receiving an initial allocation essentially reverted back to what it was in 1996: the initial allocation is a fixed size prefix that is given automatically to any new LIR requesting it. In short: today's practise of automatically giving minimum-sized allocation to new LIRs is something the RIPE NCC has been doing since its inception, and it's all in accordance with the RIPE community's policies. If you're going to continue to accuse the NCC of «selling IPv4», then you'll have to claim that that's something they've *always* done, and furthermore that they're currently «selling IPv6» in exactly the same way. Or, even better, you can stop making this nonsensical accusation. Tore [1] https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2016-May/011215.html
