RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry serving Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, has abandoned its cloud-first strategy over concerns about geopolitical risk from dependence on US-based cloud providers. Managing Director Hans Petter Holen announced the decision in a blog post, citing the Trump administration's arrival as a catalyst for European organizations to reassess their reliance on American hyperscalers for critical infrastructure. The reversal means RIPE must now rebuild the resilient infrastructure it had been migrating away from.
The organization faces significant technical and financial challenges in returning to self-hosted infrastructure. Years of prioritizing operational expenses over capital investment during the cloud migration have left much of RIPE's hardware at or beyond end-of-life. The organization must now replace aging equipment, reconsider its datacenter footprint and geographic distribution, implement redundant storage and backup systems, and select virtualization platforms that minimize vendor lock-in risks. Holen emphasized that simply returning to the previous infrastructure model is not viable, as stakeholder expectations for security, stability, and resilience have increased substantially.
RIPE expects to complete migration to a greenfield deployment by 2028 at an additional cost of €5 million, effectively returning capital expenditure to pre-2020 levels. The organization must balance this investment against membership fees and internal cost savings. To help fund the infrastructure overhaul, RIPE proposed switching from a flat membership fee to a sliding scale based on the number of internet resources held by each member. Under this proposal, 74% of members would have paid less, with larger resource holders contributing more.
In an unexpected outcome, members voted to retain the existing flat fee structure by a narrow margin of 51.1% to 48.9%. Only 3,049 of 19,415 eligible members cast ballots, representing a 15.7% turnout that RIPE described as one of the highest on record. A swing of just 35 votes would have changed the result. Both fee structures would have generated identical total revenue, but the sliding scale would have redistributed the financial burden based on resource allocation.
RIPE attributed the surprising vote outcome to possible mixed messaging during the lengthy consultation process and persistent misconceptions among members. Some members believed the sliding scale would grant greater voting rights to those paying more, an idea that faced strong opposition. The organization also noted that while there had been long-standing demand for tiered pricing, some members prefer equal financial contribution regardless of resource holdings. RIPE must now fund its infrastructure rebuild while maintaining the flat fee structure its membership chose to preserve.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/06/19/geopolitical-jitters-push-europes-internet-registry-away-from-cloud-first-strategy/5258704