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I am concerned by the fact that the IP Registry appears to have gone around figuring out the IP ranges for schools based on public records from the IANA and a bunch of vendor records. I'm sure that was difficult, and their site says it took four years. When it was done, they announced that 58% of IP ranges were wrong, and began selling the service to vendors and telling them what our IP addresses are based on their analysis. I claimed the account for my institution and discovered that there were 26 vendors already pulling my university's IP ranges from the IP Registry. Unfortunately, the IP ranges were wrong. To name a few problems: 1) They conflated us with another school in the same university system. 2) They could not know that there are a couple of IP ranges that we prefer to be treated as "off campus" even though they belong to the University. 3) They had no way to know that one particular range of our IPs is assigned to a library consortium in our state, and used for proxy servers that serve the other institutions in the university system plus several dozen public libraries. The third point is critical. By distributing these erroneous IP ranges on my school's behalf, without permission, the IP registry has effectively granted access to 26 of our subscriptions to basically everyone in my state. We are thus in violation of our license agreements and will be at risk of legal action by the publishers until I can sort this mess out. Because this involves multiple institutions -- my own, the broader university system, the aforementioned library consortium -- I am going to have to contact and explain the situation to a lot of people, and spend a lot of time checking and re-checking IP ranges, all in service of updating the IP Registry's records. Then they get to turn around and charge the publishers for my work. But frankly, their business model feels like extortion to me. We have to verify their records, or there's a chance that our resources will be accessible to people who should not have access because their analysis was incorrect. They appear to have engineered a situation that puts my institution in potential legal jeopardy, which we can only get out of by improving the data that the IP Registry is selling for a profit. I am not happy with them. The basic idea -- a centralized repository of IP ranges for bulk updating publisher records -- is both sound and useful. But their business model leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If I could, I would opt out of the system. But they do not appear to have made a mechanism available to do so. Will Martin Head of Digital Initiatives, Systems and Services Chester Fritz Library University of North Dakota