good morning ingrid,
ISPs who exchange routing information with other ISPs at multiple locations and operate without default routing may request space directly from the regional registry in its geographical area.
it has been fairly well measured that 70% of ASs have some form of default. so kiss a whole bunch of member LIRs goodbye and recover some precious IPv4 address space or fix that wording. i recommend the latter.
to be really clear on this one, see my preso from ripe/praha http://archive.psg.com/100505.ripe-visibility.pdf and the paper R Bush, O Maennel, M Roughan, S Uhlig, "Internet Optometry: Assessing the Broken Glasses in Internet Reachability", ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2009. <http://archive.psg.com/optometry.pdf> "operate without default routing" is just not what's happening. randy