of course the rules of 'contract' vary between cultures. and i am not a lawyer. i am told that in the states, one does not need paper, it is an exchange with an understanding. e.g. handshakes can be enforced if shown to be unequivocal. i am advised (that is american for i asked a lawyer:) that allocations by the internic had reasonable expectations of uniqueness, long term 'ownership', etc. in our hearts we all pretty much know 98% what the expectation was and still is. and remember, the historical holders, even in ripe's region, received those allocations from the states, from an agency operating under a usg contract, and all that stuff. so maybe finessing these juristictional issues would be worth some friendliness in negotiation a new social contract in the ripe region. :) in the case of arin, there were specific guarantees given to the usg regarding historical space. i happened to be the one doing the presos to the usg to get arin formed (i was a founding board member of arin), so you can look at, for one example, the last bullet on slide nine of <http://rip.psg.com/~randy/970414.fncac.pdf>. i would not want to have to defend in court confiscating someone's property/rights/whayever for which there was any question or doubt. i suspect that the words 'ownerless' and 'revocation' in the $subject would be very hard to define, measure, and defend. perhaps there is another approach to these problems. is not what we really want to have the whois, dns, and rpki for historical space accurate? perhaps there are other approaches to accuracy than confiscation/stealing. randy