Is RIPE NCC still necessary?

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Dear RIPE community!!

I am totally new to the understanding of worldwide IP allocation and I am eager to learn more about it! Hence, the first question that I have is, are RIR’s still necessary if we completely shifted towards a world solely with IPv6 addresses. To my understanding there are an unlimited amount of IPv6 addresses (figure of speech) i.e 3.4×10^38. Hence, if there are so many available IPv6 addresses, why do we still need RIR’s to coordinate them ? For IPv4 it made sense since the resources were limited, but not anymore with IPv6. The only things I can come up with is flooding the addressing space with bots and confuse all routing tables worldwide with duplicates for nefarious purposes. Also a large datacenter could just claim all the namespace (if all IP’s would be free) and there would be no IPv6 left. (however, could this not just be solved by having an IPv100 address system that has 10^100 possible addresses for instance.) Thanks in advance all!!!

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Good question!

IPv6 for private use, like inside an enterprise network, is likely to be unique by generating a random prefix in a specific block. There are websites that will do this for you.

But there are good reasons for registering space to be used on the Internet. One of the most important reasons is the ability to share contact information for the people running the network. Networks use this to coordinate when there are technical or security problems. No registry means no way to do this in an authoritative way.

Routing is another. Internet history is full of accidental outages arising from configuration errors. RPKI can help reduce that and it relies on hierarchical allocation to work.

There are more purposes and they’re listed in easy to read format in the RIPE Databases Ts&Cs.

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Thank you @leovegoda for you fast response!