Dear Cynthia,
Thank you for sharing these observations.
You are correct that the new reg-nr: attribute is intended to publish
company registration numbers for legal entities. For resource holders
identified as natural persons (including sole traders) or as public
organisations, the attribute is set to “Not Applicable”.
It’s also worth noting that the underlying registration data has been
collected by the RIPE NCC over around two decades, often through manual
processes. As part of introducing this new attribute, we carried out an
extensive review of around 40,000 resource holder records and a number
of corrections and reclassifications were made during this process.
A key priority in this review was to ensure that no personal data of
natural persons is published. It’s reassuring to read that you have not
encountered such cases. Public organisations can sometimes be more
difficult to classify consistently. In some countries they do have some
formal registration number and from the organisation name alone it is
not always clear whether an entity should be treated as public or not.
This means there may still be edge cases or inconsistencies, and your
example is helpful in highlighting that. If you (or others) come across
other entries that appear incorrect or inconsistent, please send them
directly to [email protected] so we can review and, where necessary,
update them. This feedback loop will help us further improve the overall
quality and consistency of the data.
Thank you again for taking the time to look into this and for
contributing to improving the RIPE Database.
Kind regards
Marco Schmidt
Manager Registration Services
RIPE NCC
On 03/05/2026 13:00, Cynthia Revström via db-wg wrote:
Hi db-wg and ncc-services-wg,
I'm not sure if this necessarily belongs in db-wg or ncc-services-wg
but I felt like it might be of interest to both.
Now that the reg-nr fields have been populated I have noticed some
interesting places where it is present and where it is omitted.
As far as I understand it, it is supposed to be omitted from orgs
referring to natural persons (I assume including sole proprietors) and
government agencies while being included for basically all other kinds
of entities.
When looking at the data for some Swedish entities I noticed that for
both non-profit associations and government agencies, there were those
with reg-nr and those without. I would expect non-profits to have
reg-nr (except for the cases when they don't have one) while I would
expect gov agencies not to have one.
One example of a gov agency having reg-nr is SUNET, the Swedish NREN:
ORG-SA58-RIPE
As SUNET is also the employer of one of the current RIPE NCC EB
members I would expect that the NCC would be somewhat familiar with
the fact that it is a gov agency.
I highlighted that I was worried about this kind of issue when we
discussed this proposal in the db-wg in November so I can't say that
I'm too surprised.
I am however thankful that I at least haven't observed any cases of a
natural person having a reg-nr on them as that was my biggest worry by
far.
-Cynthia
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