"An error occurred while accessing the NETGEAR registration server. Check your Internet"

Hey first off, please know this my response wasnt intended to be aimed at you. I know this is mostly a community of fellow users trying to help each oher out. That was more me thinking out loud and I do appreciate your chiming in and in no way was pointing my concerns at you.

So from what I've been reading, sounds like this is acutally happening and the ultimate goal has little to do with registration and eveything to do with having your permanently tied into their cloud. There are now products apparently where fucntionality is unavilable unless you you're logged into the insight app (and that's not leaned until after the point of sale and installed at home). Im sure they're positioning themselves to sell some cloud based subsciption that ties into your hardware, if they havent already.

I logged into the insight app- the registrstion messages stopped. I'll confirm if they return after I've logged out of the app.

Here's the officical netgear annoucment: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Smart-Plus-and-Smart-Pro-Managed/Why-We-Require-Registration-on-Smart-Pro-Switches/td-p/1839465

If you google it, there's a million posts from angry customers disucssing this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530009

https://brianlovin.com/hn/24530009

Luckily for me, my 'managed' switch has very few features they coud take away.