Regional internet registry

The registries were set up one region at a time, from the RIPE NCC in 1992 to AFRINIC in 2005. Each is a not-for-profit membership organisation run by a board its members elect. Each sets its rules through open meetings and mailing lists, where anyone can propose a policy. Since 2003 the five have worked together through the Number Resource Organization, the NRO.

Their shares of IPv4 are far from even. ARIN's records hold about 1.64 billion addresses, almost as many as APNIC and the RIPE NCC together. Much of that is history: 774 million of ARIN's addresses carry a delegation date before 1997, the year ARIN was founded.

At first there was one list. In APNIC's words, "the global IP address registry was simply a list of IP address ranges, along with details of the organizations to which these had been allocated". A single central registry kept it for the whole internet.

By August 1990 that was no longer enough. The Internet Activities Board wrote that "it is timely to consider further delegation of assignment and registration authority on an international basis". It also warned that class A and B network numbers "will become an increasingly scarce commodity". In October 1992 a plan named Europe, Central and South America and the Pacific Rim as the first regions, with "just a single regional registry per geographical region".

The RIPE NCC came first, in 1992, followed by APNIC in 1993, ARIN in 1997, LACNIC in 2002 and AFRINIC in 2005. The same regional logic split the old class C space in May 1993, one range per region. The structure written down in 2013 still holds: IANA serves the registries, the registries serve local internet registries and other customers, and those serve their own customers.

Routing is not part of it. Whether a block is actually announced on the internet is, the same document says, outside the scope of the registry system. A registry records who holds an address. The holder decides where it is used.

IANA's central pool emptied on 3 February 2011, when each registry received one final /8 of 16.8 million addresses. APNIC reached its final /8 first, on 15 April 2011. ARIN issued its last free IPv4 addresses on 24 September 2015, the RIPE NCC ran out on 25 November 2019, and LACNIC reserved its last block on 19 August 2020. AFRINIC has been in the final phase of its rationing policy since 13 January 2020.

What remains is small. A new RIPE NCC member can get a single /24 from a waiting list, and APNIC gives at most a /23. LACNIC gives recovered addresses to new members through a waiting list, and AFRINIC gives between a /24 and a /22 per request. On 19 September 2026 the registries' file showed about 3 million IPv4 addresses still free at APNIC and 610,560 at AFRINIC. The RIPE NCC had 3,840 left, and ARIN and LACNIC had none. Anyone who needs more turns to the transfer market and buys from networks that already hold addresses.

The registries publish a combined file of every block they have handed out, updated daily, with its size, date and the country of the holder. Whois and RDAP give the holder's name and, for smaller blocks inside it, the customer. The record describes the holder, and the file's own format says it is not "an authoritative statement of the location in which any specific resource may currently be in use".

For most addresses, the registry country and the real location still agree. On 19 September 2026 we matched the 4,058 live proxies on our free list against the registries' file. For 83.9 percent, the country in the registry record was the country where the proxy was located. For proxies in ARIN space it was only half.

One block shows why. The whole of 38.0.0.0/8 was delegated to a single US network in April 1991. ARIN's whois lists slices of it reassigned to providers abroad, such as a /19 registered in October 2022 to a provider in Maracaibo, Venezuela. That block held 178 live proxies on our list, from 68 networks, and only 3 were located in the United States. Most of the rest were in Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic and Peru.

A mismatch is not always the registry's error, because location data can be wrong as well. But when a block is registered in one country and used in another, a site that trusts the registry record will place the address in the wrong country. For proxies sold by country, that is worth checking.