RIPE NCC Survey 2023

The RIPE NCC 2023 member survey has been published. My tiny hosting company was among 3899 responses counted.

Democracy is a funny thing. Living in France, and disenfranchised by Brexit, I may not get to vote to keep Le Pen out, or even vote for the local council, but as a member of RIPE and Nominet, I do get to vote for who runs the Internet, and participate in policy-informing surveys like this one, and the one I completed for Nominet yesterday.

Some key points:

  • members are (mostly) happy with RIPE
  • members want more focus on core business (this echos what members are telling Nominet. Focus on core function, and stop getting distracted. RIPE are much better at this than Nominet)
  • use of 3rd party providers like Cloudflare is controversial. 51% seem to be okay with it, and the other 49% want to reduce reliance on 3rd parties (particularly US cloud)

Aside from obvious issues like IPv4 hoarding and security threats, I find it interesting that the following points were raised by enough members to warrant mention in the report:

"A perceived rise in goverment influence, both democratic and authoritarian, and geopolitical tensions that threaten Internet neutrality are also seen as a challenge to Internet stability … comments indicated that threats from governments (very much including the EU) to control the Internet" will lead to "fragmentation due to differing regulations, censorship, and geopolitical tensions".

and

"Comments also highlighted concerns about "over-reliance" on 3rd party vendors, particularly "large, US-based cloud resources", with some members instead wanting ... "greater use of open-source software"

Given RIPE's strong commercial membership base, it's great to see human rights perspectives and support for Open Source coming through in a membership survey.

As I said in my talk on Democracy at LCA2020, one of the more powerful ways to participate in a democracy is outside of the political system, through organisation membership and active participation. My vote in organisations like RIPE and Nominet counts for a lot more than any vote I cast at a polling station. I always take a bit of time to read up on candidates for elections and cast my vote, because the policies set by these organisations directly affect how our Internet functions.

2023-10-11