Anchored Registry · coverage
Why only one registry has pages here
A sponsoring LIR is a relationship the registry records. Exactly one of the five regional registries publishes it. That is not a gap in this directory — it is what the registries do and do not put in their databases, and it is checkable in an afternoon from their own files.
| Registry | Region | Publishes the sponsor? | Pages here |
|---|---|---|---|
| RIPE NCC | Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia | yes | 34,138 |
| APNIC | Asia and the Pacific | no | — |
| ARIN | North America | no | — |
| LACNIC | Latin America and the Caribbean | no | — |
| AFRINIC | Africa | no | — |
What was actually checked
- RIPE NCC publishes a sponsoring-org attribute on independent resources. 34,138 of them name a third-party sponsor, under 3,040 organisations. Read from the split database dumps.
- AFRINIC publishes its whole database openly and it contains the attribute zero times. Download afrinic.db.gz and grep it — that is exactly what was done here.
- LACNIC publishes its database too. Zero occurrences, and its schema is little more than the range, the country and the status.
- APNIC requires credentials for its bulk dumps — the URL answers 401 — so nothing beyond the delegation statistics can be read.
- ARIN publishes no bulk whois. Its model has End Users registering directly from ARIN, so there is no sponsoring relationship to record in the first place.
Covered by a sponsor, or by a membership
An independent resource is supposed to sit behind one of two things: its holder’s own RIPE membership, or a contract with a sponsoring LIR. 29,789 of them record no sponsoring organisation — which sounds alarming and mostly is not, because almost all of those holders are members. Counted from the dumps on 2026-10-08.
| Of those, they are | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Held by a RIPE member itself — needs no sponsorThe member is the sponsor. This is the overwhelming majority and it is not a gap. | 29,294 | 98.3% |
| An IXP peering LANAssigned from 2001:7f8::/32 under the IXP policy, which records no sponsor by design. | 291 | 1.0% |
| Holder not published, or no organisation on the objectCannot be judged from the published data either way. | 18 | 0.1% |
| Covered by neither a sponsor nor a membershipWhat is actually left. | 186 | 0.6% |
So 99.3% of “no sponsor recorded” is entirely proper, and 186 resources are covered by nothing visible in the registry. Some of those are old assignments from before the sponsoring-organisation attribute was enforced; some are holders whose sponsorship ended and whose deregistration has not caught up. Membership is read from org-type on the organisation object, so a holder that is a member under a different object counts here as uncovered when it is not — which is why the number is published and the names are not.
What is global anyway
All five registries publish delegation statistics, mirrored on one host. Merged, they say which registry holds any number on the internet — 17,564 ranges covering 2,624 AS-number bands, 14,914 IPv4 and 26 IPv6. So the search answers for a resource in any region: it will tell you whose registry it is in, and that the registry does not publish who sponsors it, rather than pretending not to know.