I have been writing a modest little software tool recently that seeks to ferret out the identity of the "top level" registrant organization for any given assigned IPv4 address. In this context by "top level" I mean the entity that obtained the relevant IP address assignment directly, either from one of the five regional Internet registries or else from some subserviant national Internet registry. This softare tool always starts by querying whois.iana.org in order to obtain a first-order referral to one of the WHOIS servers belonging to of the five regional Internet registries... usually and often the correct one that actually holds the desired information. Due to various inter-region transfers that have taken place over time however, the first-order referral given by whois.iana.org is often simply wrong, and it is really some other WHOIS server of some other one of the five regional Internet registries that actually contains the information sought. Conveniently, in the case of the ARIN WHOIS server and the APNIC WHOIS server, even in those cases where these respective WHOIS servers do not contain the data sought, e.g. due to some inter-region transfer, these WHOIS servers are at least helpful enough to provide in their responses explict referrals to the proper regional Internet registry WHOIS server where the desired data can in fact be obtained. I would like to request that NCC staff administering the RIPE WHOIS data base likewise incoroprate some such helpful explicit referral text into the WHOIS responses for all number resources where whois.iana.org believes that the resources are under the administration of RIPE, but where in fact the number resources in question have been transferred to some different region. During the early testing of my small software tool I have already encountered a number of such cases. In each of these cases I had to sort out the problem by hand -- I had to ferret out the correct RIR WHOIS server by other means, the responses from whois.ripe.net being of no help whatsoever in this regard, and I then had to program in some "manual overide" work-arounds in my code in order to deal with these cases: 51.79.0.0/16 51.81.0.0/16 51.161.0.0/16 51.162.0.0/17 51.222.0.0/16 151.101.0.0/16 151.139.0.0/16 151.164.0.0/16 151.190.0.0/16 185.105.7.0/24 185.150.189.0/24 185.150.190.0/23 185.171.208.0/22 194.204.192.0/18 I have some faith and hope that the community, the members, and the staff of the RIPE region will wish to be at least as helpful with repect to this WHOIS referral issue as their North American and Asia/Pacific counterparts. Given the expected increases in inter-regional transfers it seems that the time is... well... ripe, to address this small but consequential issue within the data base. Regards, rfg